Notable Sandwiches #92: Italian
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my long-suffering editor David Swanson, trek through the enormous and unwieldy document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, sandwich and descriptor category of sandwiches: the Italian.
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Legend has it that Salome, with her dance of the seven veils, was the most beautiful creature the world has ever seen. But: move over bitch, it’s time for Salame!—a salt-creature of infinite variety, a bloom of spice and color and flesh. Salome also asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, whereas I would simply refuse to become an infamous example of female treachery and order a sandwich instead.
The Italian sub (or hoagie, grinder, wedge, spuckie, torpedo, or other weird regional variation that you’re welcome to mention in the comments; we'll be delving deeper into this lexicographic thicket once we reach "S") is essentially what I picture when I think of the generic idea of a sandwich.
It’s on a oblong hero roll, is decently sized, has a big ol’ pile of meat in it, and makes for a hefty, chewy meal unto itself. Or two meals, depending on the source. The Wikipedia list certainly delves into sandwiches of dubious sandwichiness (the hot dog) and extremely niche sandwiches (coming soon, the Austrian Kaisers Jagdproviant) but this is it: the platonic ideal. It’s also the only sandwich we’ve more or less covered twice, seeing as our first column, lo so many sandwiches ago, was the American Hero.
The first time, I was raw with the newness of the experience of sandwich chronicling and spent a lot of time throat-clearing and discussing "Italian" terminology: This time, with a certain amount of throat-clearing preserved, I’m going straight to the meat of the matter. Literally!
There is a fantastic and beautiful panoply of Italian salumi, each with its own provenance, each with its own savor, and each, to me, an item of beauty. Transformed from offcuts and castoffs to princely provender by the process of preservation, a pre-refrigeration necessity and a contemporary art form, smoked and salted meats are a food pyramid unto themselves; the best salamis, piled in display cases and dangling from ceilings in a Chihuly-esque riot of meat in an Italian shop, are red jewels of human innovation. No one can AI capocollo. You can’t download prosciutto. You have to pierce its wizened outside to the fatty core within, and I think that’s beautiful. In this era in which everything seems to be reduced to machinized, enshittified, rent-seeker shadows of themselves, a loaf of mortadella can be the buoy that, once grasped, keeps you afloat in a dehumanizing reality. Plus it has pistachios!
Here are some meats you might find in an Italian sandwich—sourced from Lidia’s Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Great Italian Cook—and the list sounds like a canto by Dante Alighieri (but from the lesser-known Paradiso, about heaven, not those ones about eternal damnation):
• BRESAOLA Cured, air-dried beef matured for several months, cut in thin slices, and served as an antipasto.
• CACCIATORE Pure pork salami, originally from Piedmont and Lombardy; the name derives from its small size, ideal for the hunters to bring along as a snack on their hunt.
• CACCIATORINO Small salami.
• CAPOCOLLO Salami made from cured pork-shoulder chunks, mixed with finely minced pork fat, sweet and hot red peppers, seasonings, and spices, then air-dried.
• CAPPELLO DI PRETE (CAPPEL DI PRETE) Traditional name for a salami or cotechino made near Parma, in Emilia-Romagna, originally produced from what was left over from the pig's thigh when producing culatello. The extra pieces were chopped, sealed in the skin of the last part of the hoof, and sewn in a triangle.
• CAPRA, PROSCIUTTO DI Salted and air-cured cured goat leg, goat prosciutto.
• CARNE SECCA Cured meats; dried meats.
• COPPA Pork sausage, dried and smoked with herbs. Or a large sausage containing distinct pieces of pork shoulder and pork fat.
• CULATELLO Large, air-cured, salamilike ham, made near Parma; it uses the upper hind part of the pig leg, seasoned and air-cured in a casing.
• FINOCCHIONA Salami flavored with fennel, typically Tuscan.
• MOCETTA (MOTZETTA) Cured salami made with the leg of an Alpine ibex.
• MORTADELLA Cold cut originally from Bologna, made from 60 percent lean pork meat (shoulder or hind leg) and 40 percent fat pork meat (cheek), made into a paste with lard cubes throughout. The long cooking process is very carefully executed by indirect steam.
• PANCETTA Belly of pork cured with salt and spices, rolled up, and eaten either in thin slices raw, or cooked in thicker slices
• PROSCIUTTO Fresh ham preserved by salt curing and air drying. Served in thin slices, usually as an antipasto, also used in cooking.
• PROSCIUTTO COTTO Cooked ham, boned and pressed into a typical ham shape.
• SALAME Type of cased sausage named after Salamis, which was a city of the Roman Empire in Cyprus. Salame is variable in composition and texture, although, with few exceptions, it is 100 percent meat with flavorings, and is usually known by a regional name in Italy.
• SALAME CASALINGO Homemade salami.
• SALAME COTTO Type of salami containing pork and peppercorns with herbs, cooked in the casing and then cured.
• SALAME DI PORCO Pork salame.
• SALAME FELINO Salami of pure pork mixed with white wine, flavored with garlic and whole peppercorns, made in the town of Felino.
• SALAME FINOCCHIONA Large salami of pure pork flavored with fennel.
• SALAME FIORENTINO Tuscan salami made of pork.
• SALAME GENOVESE Salami made of roughly equal parts veal and fatty pork.
• SALAMELLA DI CINGHIALE Wild-boar sausage.
• SALAME MILANESE Salami made with 50 percent lean pork, 20 percent fat pork, and 30 percent beef or veal, flavored with garlic and white peppercorns, air-dried and matured for 2 to 3 months.
• SALAME NAPOLETANO Long thin salami from Naples made of pork and beef, seasoned with ground pepper.
• SALAME SARDO Salami from Sardinia flavored with red pepper.
• SALAME UNGHERESE Hungarian-style salami made in Italy from finely chopped pork, pork fat, beef, and garlic, moistened with white wine, and flavored with paprika and other seasonings.
• SALAMIN D'LA DUJA Soft, mild salami preserved in fat in a special pot called a duja.
• SALAMINI Small salami.
• SOPPRESSATA Large sausage made from large ovals.
• SOPRESSA (COPA) Salt-cured pork sausage, air-dried, flavored with herbs, and sometimes smoked.
The best Italian sandwiches I’ve had (and I know there are ranked lists from other food writers, and I ignore them in favor of reaching into the taste-stew of my own memory) have been in little storefronts in the North Bronx, in the general vicinity of, but—and this is important—not on Arthur Avenue, the true Little Italy of New York. (Morris Park, the neighborhood in question, is so Italian that there are also a ton of Albanians there, much like in Italy itself; it’s also, bar none, got the best eating in New York, in my entirely unhumble opinion).
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How well I recall the mortadella, the prosciutto de parma, the paper-thin provolone, the serried ranks of olives and marinated red peppers, the fresh-baked, chewy bread that went into those culinary songs of Achilles; how the salt and the flame and the acid and the smoke and the starch harmonized in me like an angelic choir; how everyone in the shop talked like real New Yawkers, and the espresso soda in the coolers, and the strange time in my life they starred in, those sandwiches, with their layers of meat like striations in a cliffside, their balsamic drips and artichoke slivers, their composition like that of a Piero della Francesca painting, or Michelangelo's Pietà the precise sound of prosciutto de parma being shaved on a counter-top mandolin.
This is the song of the sandwich, and I carry it within me, having become a latter-day bard of its wisdom. It says: stay human. It says: we carry the smoke and salt of our ancestors inside us. It says: some things will always be true, will hang within us pendulous and veritable as a salami on a ceiling. It says: eat of me and know thyself.
Love,
Talia
I've grown up calling one variation Garibaldis, the name coming from Paisan's in Madison, WI. It never comes up unless you're watching Italian history or snickering during Babylon 5.
Heeding the call, in my part of Westchester County they were known, by all and with absolutely no deviation, as “wedges”.