Tramezzino ai Carciofi

At a Venetian bacaro the bartender lifts carciofini sott'olio from their jar with a wooden tong, presses each artichoke between two folds of clean kitchen paper to drain the marinade, and works through a full handful before any bread comes off the loaf. The artichokes go onto a board, get quartered with a small knife, and are folded together with a spoon of mayonnaise lightened with lemon. Pane in cassetta is opened and the crusts left on for now. Mayonnaise is spread to both inner faces of two slices; the artichoke mixture is mounded into the middle, pushed slightly toward the centre of the slice; the second piece is pressed down, and the four crusts are sliced off in a single circuit at the end. The cut is diagonal, two domed triangles to the case.

The artichoke is meant to carry the whole triangle here, not act as a counter to a ham or a tuna. Carciofini sott'olio are baby carciofo heads, picked young and tight before the choke develops, blanched briefly, then preserved in olive oil with white wine vinegar, bay, peppercorns and sometimes garlic. The Italian artichoke tradition reaches across the country, with mammole from the Roman countryside, romaneschi from Lazio, spinosi sardi from Sardinia, all preserved in oil in the regional conserve kitchens of Liguria and Piedmont. The build chooses the small herbed pickled head specifically, because the marinade gives the filling its acid and its herb at once, and a meatless triangle needs both notes to read against a soft white frame.

The failure modes are about wet meeting soft and they compound. Artichokes lifted straight from the jar without blotting, then chopped into the mayonnaise, carry their oily marinade into the loaf; within an hour the lower slice goes slick and dark and the triangle slumps. Artichokes left whole as quarters rather than chopped fine make every other bite all bread or all sour leaf; chopped to roughly the size of a finger-tip pad, they distribute evenly and the bite finds artichoke each time. Mayonnaise applied to only one inner face leaves the other slice unsealed; the residual oil from the artichokes seeps through the unprotected crumb on that side, and by the time the triangle is cut the loaf shows a translucent stain along the lower edge. The seal is the engineering; the chop is the eating.

The triangle eats cool and clean. The bread gives at the teeth as a thin soft layer that disappears into the chew; the mayonnaise reads first as a smooth dressed coolness, then the artichoke arrives as a slightly herbed sour lift with the lemon riding behind it, then a faint bitter green note from the leaf at the centre of the bite. The whole object is dry to the touch, faintly cool to the lip, completely without crunch. The smell at the case is olive oil and the dry crumb of the loaf. A glass of prosecco against it sharpens the artichoke's acid back into the foreground within a sip; a small spritz al bitter does the same.

Ordering at the bacaro counter is a finger pointed through the glass and a name in the genitive: un tramezzino ai carciofi. The convention at the case is that the triangle does not survive past the day it was built; the bartender disposes of the morning's unsold triangles at close because the soft loaf under a vegetable filling cannot be held fresh overnight. At a Milanese aperitivo case the same triangle is set out on a small ceramic tray with toothpicks. Whether the customer takes one or three is settled in the head as the eyes scan the row, not asked.

The artichoke anchors a quiet shelf of related triangles, each with one element shifted. A version with prosciutto cotto, cooked ham, folded in beside the artichokes is the al prosciutto e carciofini build, no longer the vegetarian one; it pairs the artichokes against the mild dairy salt of cooked ham. A version with oil-packed tuna folded in is the al tonno e carciofini. The all-vegetable wider category includes the alle verdure grigliate triangle with grilled aubergine and pepper instead of artichoke; and the vegetariano mix-of-everything build. The single-vegetable triangle is the cleanest of these because the one jar-preserved head carries enough acid and enough herb to read as its own dish.

A Roman Artichoke and a Turin Triangle

The Italian artichoke tradition is among the oldest in Europe. Cynara cardunculus in cultivation around the central Mediterranean is documented from classical Roman agricultural texts, with the modern globe artichoke selected from those wild ancestors in the kitchen gardens of southern Italy by the fifteenth century. The Roman dialect varieties cimaroli, mammole, and romaneschi are listed as Lazio Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali, with the carciofo romanesco del Lazio admitted to EU IGP protection in May 2002. The preserving-in-oil tradition that gives carciofini sott'olio is associated with Liguria and Albenga in Piedmont's preserving kitchens from the nineteenth century onward, and the Albenga carciofo spinoso entered the EU PAT register as a recognised regional product.

The tramezzino on which this filling sits has a fixed Italian birth date. The Turinese Caffè Mulassano in Piazza Castello, Turin, introduced the crustless triangular bar sandwich in 1925, served as an aperitivo accompaniment, with the name tramezzino conventionally attributed to the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio as an Italian replacement for the English borrowing sandwich. The vegetable-filled triangles, including the artichoke build, develop at Veneto bars in Venice, Padua and Treviso through the mid- and later twentieth century as the meatless aperitivo option alongside the more famous tuna and prosciutto fillings.

The Caffè Mulassano on Piazza Castello in Turin, where the format was assembled in 1925, still puts crustless triangles up at its marble bar today. The Lazio carciofo romanesco EU IGP register entry dates from 26 May 2002, and the Ligurian Albenga carciofo spinoso is registered as a Prodotto Agroalimentare Tradizionale in the national Ministry of Agriculture list.