Tramezzino Funghi e Formaggio

Button mushrooms go into a pan with olive oil, garlic and parsley and cook until every drop of water has left them, then drain and press firm; that is funghi trifolati, the standard cooked mushroom of an Italian kitchen, and it is half of this filling. The other half is a mild meltable cheese. Set them together in the soft frame with no cured pork anywhere in the build, and the triangle changes register from the rest of the case. Most of its neighbours lean on a slice of cured pork for their salt, the cooked-ham builds, the speck triangle, the raw cured leg. Pull that anchor out and a cooked vegetable and a cheese have to do the work alone.

The savour the missing pork would supply comes off the mushroom. Cooked down hard, the champignon carry an earthy, faintly woodsy depth that reads through the bite. The cheese brings the fat and the body the dish would otherwise lack, a soft fontina Val d'Aosta off the Aosta cow's-milk wheel or a sliced domestic emmental, both mild, both meltable. No anchovy salt sits in here either, no oil-cured fish, no caper brine. A shake of the salt cellar is no substitute for either piece, and a sharper cheese pulls the whole thing into a different sandwich.

The water in the mushroom is the single thing that wrecks it. Funghi set in still damp leak through the soft pancarrè, and within the hour the lower face has gone a translucent grey and the triangle sags at the diagonal. Sliced too coarse, the mushrooms sit as awkward chunks that spill the moment the triangle is lifted. The cheese fails on its own axis: laid as a thick slab it locks a cold dense centre between two softer layers and the bite reads as one mouthful of cheese with garnish; sliced fine and dispersed through the mushrooms it carries through every cross-section. The bread fails on time, the cut faces stiffening if it stands too long in a dry case.

Lift one from the case mid-afternoon, cool and soft and light in the hand. The first bite gives a thin trace of the bind, then the cooked-down mushroom comes through dark and woodsy with a residue of pan garlic still on it. The cheese reads a moment behind, smooth and lightly nutty, a dairy roundness that wraps the earth note and rounds it off. None of it is warm. Nothing in the bite announces salt outright; it arrives through the cheese and the mushroom together. What stays is a vegetable-and-milk note, a long mushroom finish that runs on after the soft bread has dissolved.

The order is short, a finger to the glass and uno funghi e formaggio. In a Veneto bar it sits between the all-vegetable build and the pricier ham fillings, the cheap end of the mid-row and often the one filling on the case a vegetarian customer can take with confidence. In Lombard bars the same combination is reliable but less central than its cooked-ham cousin; in Roman bars, where the case is smaller, a customer may find only the plain funghi triangle and have to ask whether a slice of cheese can go in. The grammar is the case grammar, not a kitchen one: what is in the glass is what can be eaten.

Its near relatives keep one of the two pieces and change the other. Swap the mild cheese for a sharp gorgonzola and the gentle round turns to a pungent push that fights the mushroom rather than wrapping it, a build the case counts separately. Lay a slice of cooked ham into this filling and the cured-pork salt anchor walks back in, turning it into the ham-and-mushroom build, the everyday Veneto staple a vegetarian customer is deliberately stepping around by ordering this one. Run the mushrooms alone in the soft frame and the cheese drops out entirely, leaving a sparer all-vegetable triangle. Each is its own filling at its own price.

Origin and history

The meatless mushroom-and-cheese filling comes with no name and no founding bar attached, and no date for when it was first built; cooked mushrooms and a mild cheese are two of the most ordinary things an Italian kitchen keeps, and their meeting in a crustless triangle is an everyday filling rather than an authored recipe. The form around them, though, is dateable. Angela Demichelis Nebiolo and her husband Onorino, lately home from Detroit, took over a Piazza Castello establishment in Turin in 1925, where they served small crustless triangles cut from the soft boxed sandwich loaf Turin's bakers already turned out. The form spread through Italy over the following decade; its first recipe to reach a national readership ran in La Cucina Italiana in July 1936.

Of the two fillings the cheese carries the harder dated record. Fontina Val d'Aosta, the Aosta cow's-milk wheel, appears in a 1477 treatise by the Vercelli physician Pantaleone da Confienza, who left the earliest survey of European cheeses. Its Protected Designation of Origin arrived from the European Union in 1996, pinning the milk to the Aosta valley, naming the alpine terroir, and setting the producer rules that govern the name on a wheel.