Tramezzino Bresaola e Rucola

Bresaola is northern Italian beef cured to feel almost like prosciutto, and it gets into this triangle the same way it gets onto an antipasto plate, sliced almost to glass and draped in soft overlapping sheets. The meat is Valtellina cure, a Lombard alpine product produced under European geographical-indication protection since February 1996, normally made from a single round-cut of grass-fed silverside, salted with juniper and bay for two to three weeks and then air-dried in the cold valley breeze for five to eight weeks until the muscle has gone deep ruby and the cure has lost roughly forty percent of its starting weight. Drop a few leaves of rocket over those sheets, close the triangle, and the Lombard plate has translated to bar bread.

The leaf is the load-bearing seasoning. Bresaola eaten alone is lean and clean and slightly austere, a mineral mouthful with no fat to soften it. The pancarrè under it is sweeter and softer still. A few leaves of rocket draped through the meat are what turn that two-element sandwich into one with a pulse. The leaf carries a peppery bitter green note the cure cannot reach. It works because the cure and the leaf each push in the opposite direction.

This is the rare tramezzino whose filling problem is not water. The cure has been air-dried to roughly sixty percent of its starting weight; it carries almost no moisture into the bread. The risk is the inverse, dryness. Slice the meat thick and the cure eats as a sheet of leather between bread. Cut it more than a few hours before the sandwich is built and the sheets harden at the edges, losing their drape. Pack the rocket in a tight wad at one end and the rest of the triangle is bare lean meat. The bind is the third decision; use too much mayonnaise and it buries the cure under a soft fat note, use nothing at all and the inner crumb reads tight and dry against the lean sheets. A thin film of mayonnaise, or a thread of olive oil run across the bread, fixes that.

A bar in Milan at lunch, the case lit cool from inside, the bresaola triangle visible at the front of the row by its dark ruby cut face against the pale crumb. Lift it cool from the case and the weight is light, slightly more than a tuna triangle, considerably less than a veal one. The bread yields easily under the thumb. Cool against the lip, the crumb dissolves first, then a fine olive-oil slick comes through, then the cured beef arrives lean and mineral and a little sweet, a hint of juniper sitting under the salt. A beat later the rocket pulse hits, peppery and faintly bitter and entirely green, and it cuts the cure cleanly. The whole bite stays cool. Cured silverside carries almost no fat to coat the tongue, and the aftertaste is rocket pepper, not meat.

In Milan and Bergamo bars the bresaola e rucola triangle is one of the more expensive choices in the row, regularly two and a half to three euros against the one-fifty or two of the tuna and prosciutto builds, because the cured beef itself costs the bar more per kilo than almost any other filling in the case. The Lombard order at the counter is a simple bresaola, sometimes specified as bresaola della Valtellina if the bar is showing off its supplier, and the regional tic worth knowing is the practice of asking for it dressed con limone e Grana, with a squeeze of lemon and a shaving of Grana Padano laid across the rocket, which most Milanese bars will assemble on request without raising an eyebrow.

The closest filling-relations all hold the rocket and swap the protein. Trade the bresaola for prosciutto crudo and the cure goes sweet and silken instead of lean and mineral, the build a different sibling. Trade it for cured speck and the cure picks up alpine smoke. Trade it for smoked salmon and the build crosses into the cured-fish row, the salmon-and-rocket triangle, a separate Mulassano-form filling. Inside this same Lombard family, replacing the rocket with a few leaves of radicchio swings the bitter note darker; adding sliced Grana shavings tips the build toward the antipasto plate. The plain bresaola tramezzino without the leaf, all meat on bread with only a thread of oil, is the leaner parent build, a separate entry in the case.

Valtellina cure, Lombard bread case

The cure itself is the part of this sandwich with the longest record. Bresaola is documented in the Lombard alpine valley of the Valtellina as early as the sixteenth century, mentioned in 1597 by the chronicler Ortensio Lando as a regional cured beef of the valley, and the technique of salting beef rounds and hanging them in alpine air to dry is older still than the first written record. The modern legal mark arrived in February 1996, when Bresaola della Valtellina was granted European Protected Geographical Indication status, tying the cure to the province of Sondrio and to specified cuts of beef silverside.

The rocket is the late entrant. Italian cookery used wild rocket, rucola selvatica, as a salad and a seasoning across the south long before the leaf was cultivated north of Rome, but raw rocket in northern Italian sandwiches and antipasti as a standard tic is a post-war development, a leaf that climbed the peninsula north through restaurant cooking from the 1970s onward. Pairing it with the lean cured beef on a plate, the famous bresaola con rucola e Grana, was a Milan move of the 1980s, identified with the Cipriani-Harry's-Bar register, and from those plates the leaf migrated into the bar-case tramezzino.

The triangle that carries the meeting was devised at the caffè Mulassano in Turin's Piazza Castello in 1925 by Angela and Onorino Nebiolo. The Mulassano fillings of the 1920s were anchovy butter, prosciutto and tuna; the bresaola-and-rocket build was added to the Italian bar repertoire in the 1980s as the leaf and the antipasto register entered northern restaurants. Inside the Valtellina itself, the Sondrio cooperative Bresaola Punta d'Anca is among the dozen IGP-licensed producers feeding bars across Lombardy.