Tramezzino Gorgonzola e Noci

A Lombard cheese counter in Milan keeps the gorgonzola behind a curved glass with a small ceramic dish and a wooden palette beside it, and the assistant works the soft dolce wedge against a little mascarpone until the salt drops half a register and the paste lifts from the cloth in soft white-and-blue-green ribbons. That eased paste is what the bar takes in the morning and turns into the tramezzino: a thinner spread than the wedge ever was, calmer than its veins suggest, with chopped toasted walnut folded through. The intensity that makes gorgonzola a dish in its own right is being smoothed down on purpose to fit the crumb of a soft white loaf.

The dose runs along two opposites. Gorgonzola is a cow's-milk vein cheese matured in caves around the towns of Gorgonzola and Cremona, with the soft dolce running rich and milky and sweet at the rind and the firmer piccante turning sharper and saltier with more vein. Walnut is the dry note: oily but moisture-free, tannic, with a faint bitterness in the brown papery skin. Spread one and fold the other through, and the cheese softens into the crumb while the nut keeps a discrete crunch, the bite alternating between a slick of sweet-salty cream and a brittle vegetable note that pulls the cheese back from being one long buttery thing.

The failures all stem from the wet meeting the dry. Use a piccante wedge without the mascarpone ease, and the salt punches through the bland bread to a single loud note; the soft dolce with a touch of mascarpone or unsalted butter is the workable starting point. Skip the toasting and the walnut goes limp against the cheese moisture within twenty minutes, surrendering its crunch. Chop the nut too coarsely and the triangle sheds pieces every time the diagonal is cut. Spread the cheese to the very edges and the slumping paste will leak at the seam by the time it reaches the counter. The cheese sits banked toward the centre with a clear half-centimetre at the rim, and the walnut is folded through evenly rather than scattered on top.

Cool from the case the soft pancarrè gives loosely under the thumb, lighter than a meat-filled triangle of the same size. The cut shows a pale streaked cream with brown specks through it. The first bite is the dry crumb, then a thin slick of the eased cheese arriving milky and sweet at first, the blue-vein piquancy unfolding a beat later behind the sweetness. The walnut crunch lands inside that, dry and tannic with a faint bitter brown-skin note that sits cleanly against the wet cheese. The aftertaste is faintly salt-and-pepper at the back of the tongue, with the walnut bitterness behind it; the cheese never reaches the loud register a cheeseboard would carry, by design.

It is ordered in a Milanese or Bergamasque bar by saying quello al gorgonzola, the one with the gorgonzola, and the price runs close to the other cheese triangles in the row. Lombard bars treat it as a regional triangle even within Italy: it is more often present in the case in Lombardy and Piedmont than in the Veneto or Roman cases, because gorgonzola is a Lombard cheese with its DOP boundaries running across the provinces of Novara, Bergamo, Brescia, Como, Cremona, Cuneo, Lecco, Lodi, Milan, Monza, Pavia, Varese, Vercelli, and Verbano-Cusio-Ossola. The drink alongside is typically a Verdicchio or a Moscato that takes the salt.

The triangle belongs to a family of vein-cheese-and-something builds, and a few are worth distinguishing. Streak honey through the eased gorgonzola and the result is a separate sweet-and-salt build, no nut required, the contrast moving from texture to sugar. Swap walnut for sliced fresh pear and the dry crunch becomes a wet sweet, a different physics that needs a thicker bind to stop the fruit moisture reaching the crumb. The French sandwich roquefort-noix on a baguette is the same cheese-and-nut logic on a different cheese and a different bread: Roquefort is sheep's milk and saltier, the baguette is crusted and open rather than soft and closed, and the build is open-faced and sometimes warm rather than cold and triangular. Two veins, two breads, two physics.

Origin and history

Gorgonzola has been documented as a named cheese from the town of the same name east of Milan since at least the eleventh century, with the modern vein-marbled version coming into commercial production through the late nineteenth century once Penicillium inoculation could be controlled in cave aging. Gorgonzola DOP was granted European Protected Designation of Origin status in 1996; the discipline fixes the production area, the use of whole pasteurised cow's milk, the two named forms dolce and piccante, and the minimum aging period of fifty days for dolce and around eighty for piccante.

The crustless triangle the cheese rides in dates from a single Turin caffè in 1925. Angela and Onorino Nebiolo, returning emigrants from Detroit who bought caffè Mulassano on Piazza Castello that year, removed the toasted-bread step common to the imported English-style toast and trimmed the crusts off the soft pane in cassetta the city's bakers already supplied. The Piedmontese tramezzino is held under Piedmont on Italy's national PAT inventory of traditional regional products, opened in 1999.

The Consorzio per la Tutela del Formaggio Gorgonzola, which oversees the DOP, was founded in Novara in 1970, two and a half decades before the cheese received its 1996 European protection. The pairing of the vein cheese with walnut has no single first shop and no individual recorded inventor; what the historical record does carry is two dates, 1970 and 1996, that brought the cheese itself under formal protection long before the soft-bread triangle absorbed it as a regional bar-case filling.