skinny girls & mayonnaise

I wasn’t much of a bologna — baloney — kid when I was young. While my friends pined for white bread with bologna and mayo, I found it rather bland and uninteresting.

In my teen years, working at an Italian deli, I would discover that the origins of this pale, flaccid meatstuff was actually a salumi called mortadella (the American version was named after the central-Italian city from whence mortadella originates, Bologna). And my opinion would change.

Certainly, as salumi go, mortadella does not stand out in quite the same way as, say, a fennel-infused finocchiona or a garlicky Genovese salami. Its allure is more subtle, a Chopin composition alongside these Beethovens of sausage.

We drove through Bologna on our recent Italy vacation. I’ve heard it’s a nice city, but from the highway all we saw was impersonal sprawl. It would’ve been nice to do a mortadella tour.

Also not far from where we were passing — a 40-minute detour, in fact — was Modena, home to Massimo Bottura’s celebrated Osteria Francescana, recently named the top restaurant in the world. Bottura has reinvented Italian cuisine by exploring memory, tradition and region; reducing it and turning it upside down.

I tried to get us reservations. I failed.

Memory of a Mortadella Sandwich, from Massimo Bottura’s “Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef”

One of the signature dishes at the Osteria is something called “Memory of a Mortadella Sandwich.” When Massimo Bottura returned from a summer at the legendary Spanish avant garde restaurant, El Bulli — itself the best restaurant at the time — locals joked: “What are you going to do now, Bottura, make a mortadella foam!?” Bottura describes the dish — a mortadella foam — as follows:

“Memory of a Mortadella Sandwich is all about reducing an element to its essence. I was chasing a memory, and what is a memory if not a pure essence distilled by time? It’s funny how hard it is to let go of the thing I spent most of my youth running away from.”

I revert to the inspiration of my own childhood, the sandwich I shunned. And while a soft artisan bread replaces the Wonder bread and a delicious raw butter unseats the mayonnaise, the similarities are eerily

Not that you need a recipe — “Just put the @%$#ing mortadella and butter on the bread!!” — but here you go.

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Mortadella & butter sandwich
serves 2

4 oz. mortadella
4 slices thick, soft white bread
4 tbsp. good unsalted butter

Find the best butter you can for this sandwich. Also, make sure you’re purchasing mortadella imported from Italy, the kind with the green pistachios you can see.

Let the butter soften, not quite to room temperature but enough that you can spread it.

Spread each piece of bread with butter, and place 2 oz. of mortadella each on top of bread. Top with second slice of buttered bread, and cut in half.

Serve with a chilled dry Italian white wine, or a Moretti beer.