Tramezzino Prosciutto e Formaggio

The first thing to settle is which ham. The cooked-ham-and-cheese triangle uses prosciutto cotto, the steam-cooked deli leg pressed into a brick and sliced into rounds, not crudo, the raw air-cured leg the bar's other ham builds carry. A cook reaching into the deli case picks the cotto by reflex when the partner is going to be a mild Italian cheese, because the steam-cooked product is gentler and gentler is what reads against a melting cheese; raw cured leg next to fontina would push the salt past where the cheese can answer it. The triangle is the supermarket-deli pairing condensed onto bar bread, and the ham choice is what tells you which case you are at.

The cheese decision matters almost as much. Fontina Val d'Aosta, the Aosta Valley cow's-milk wheel that received European Protected Designation of Origin status in 1996, is the canonical Italian partner: creamy, faintly nutty, soft enough to fold into the triangle without snapping at the edge. The other regular partner is an Italian emmental, a domestic cousin of the holed Swiss cheese, also mild and also melt-prone, which Italian dairies cut and sell sliced specifically for sandwich use. A bar going further afield uses a wedge of Lombard asiago fresco or a slice of Tuscan caciotta; the cheaper case uses a slice of sottilette, the Italian processed slice. The pairing stays inside the mild-fat register either way.

The two flat fillings together are unforgiving on layering, because both are sliced dry sheets and either one stacked flat tips the build into a slab. The cheese needs to be sliced thinner than the ham, because cheese held thick locks a centre that the teeth meet as a cold dense block. The ham is folded loose into peaks rather than laid as a sheet, the way the cured-ham builds are. The bind has to cover the inner crumb fully on both faces, because two dry layers stacked together leave the bread reading parched in the back of the mouth if the butter or mayonnaise stops short of the corners. A working triangle alternates: bread, butter, folded ham, thin sliced cheese, butter, bread, the cheese sitting against one bound surface rather than between two dry layers.

Lift one cool from a Lombard or Emilian bar case mid-morning. The first cue is colour through the bread: a faint warm yellow at the cheese line, a soft pink at the ham line. Bite and the crumb dissolves under the teeth, then a thin trace of butter, then the cheese arrives smooth and lightly nutty with a faint lactic tang, then the cotto a beat later, gentle and meaty and mildly salted, its smoke-soft cure note settling under the cheese rather than beside it. The temperature reads bar-fridge cool through the whole bite. Two mild things together, neither one loud, both rounded by the soft frame, ending on a milky aftertaste rather than a salt one.

The order is short and direct: prosciutto e formaggio, ham and cheese, with the cook understood to mean cotto for the ham and a mild Italian cheese for the cheese. The Italian deli register reads this filling as the children's-lunch pairing scaled to bar size: the panino al prosciutto cotto e formaggio handed across every primary-school canteen counter in the country, the same combination compressed onto crustless bread for the adult standing at the bar railing at five. In Lombard cafés the bar pricing puts this triangle a step above the plain cotto and well below the cured-leg-and-artichoke pairing, the universal middle of the row.

The siblings change one piece and become other things. Swap the cooked ham for raw cured Italian leg and the build tilts assertive and loses the soft-cheese partnership the cotto carries; that one is a separate filling. Swap the cheese for a slice of grilled vegetable and the whole register moves from deli to garden. Run the same cotto without any cheese at all and the triangle is the plain cooked-ham build, the cheapest in the row. The bar-toasted hot tramezzino toast, the same fill heated until the cheese runs, is a different object served warm; this triangle is the cold sister of that hot one. A variant of the cold cotto-and-cheese pairing none of those is; each occupies a separate slot on the case menu, with its own price and its own customer.

Origin and history

Both fillings are old. Italian cooked ham, brine-cured then steamed and pressed, traces to Roman methods recorded by Apicius and to medieval monastery records of cooked-leg recipes in Emilia, the cooked product running parallel to the raw cure for two thousand years. The pressed-mould industrial form Italian bars buy emerged in the late nineteenth century with Italian deli factories in Modena and Parma, the same cluster that produces the raw cure. Fontina, the Aosta cow's-milk wheel, is mentioned in a Vercelli physician's treatise of 1477 by Pantaleone da Confienza, and it was registered as a European Protected Designation of Origin product in 1996, the same year as the major raw cures.

The crustless triangle they meet inside is younger. Caffè Mulassano on Turin's Piazza Castello put the sliced-crust-off form on its counter in 1925, run at the time by Angela Demichelis and her husband Onorino Nebiolo, an Italian couple recently back from a stretch in Detroit; the bread under that build was Turin's commercial pancarrè, already on bakery shelves before the war. The first filling there is recorded as butter-and-anchovy. The ham-and-cheese pairing migrated onto the new bread within a few years, the cotto and the fontina readily available to any northern Italian bar through the cured-meat and dairy trade.

The Piedmontese tramezzino has carried a place on the Italian PAT register, the agriculture ministry's traditional-foods inventory begun in 1999, under Piedmont. The mild-ham-and-cheese filling carries no separate file. It rides on the cooked-ham record running back through medieval Emilian cooks and on the Fontina DOP file granted in 1996 by the same European ruling that codified the raw cures, the Aosta Valley wheel and the Emilian pressed leg meeting on bread in cafés across the Po plain.