In praise of tramezzini
July 21, 2020
When I first laid eyes on tramezzini as a student in Padua, I thought I was missing something. I almost wanted to point, and say, “Does anyone realize these sandwiches are raw?” Typically found tucked under damp tea towels in bar display cases, tramezzini are tiny, white, triangle-shaped pillows of sandwiches.
They seemed like they had been dropped in from another world. They all contained mayonnaise. Hadn’t we come here to escape mayonnaise? There were tramezzini of tuna and mayonnaise, egg and mayonnaise, ham and mayonnaise, spinach and mayonnaise, tomato and mayonnaise. Wasn’t mayonnaise meant for supermarket turkey slapped between slices of Wonder Bread? Or eaten with cucumber, somewhere near a croquet set?
I never touched a tramezzino in those days.
Lately, Erik, who back in our Padua student days also eschewed these little things, called me from Venice where he was happily eating them. “You know how food in the fifties was meant to be bland and consistent, and not interrupt you?” he said. “That’s what these are. They are consistent. They are good. They are not abbondanza.”
They are everything that an Italian-American’s Southern-Italian-slanted view of food is not. They are not hot, spicy, ample, or dripping in tomatoes, salumi, and cheese. Tramezzini belong to the north of Italy: deriving from a hotel in Turin in the 1920s as an Italian interpretation of English tea sandwiches, which are similarly small, soft, light and pale. But tramezzini (and tea sandwiches as well) are not boring - rather, as Erik said, they are consistent. They are always produced on the same, store-bought white bread, crusts cut off. Yet within this consistent form, the fillings are infinitely variable. The only common factor, as I may have mentioned, is the mayonnaise.
Tramezzini are what to eat when you are busy, hungry, and do not want a whole meal, you don’t want a meal at all, you want something else entirely - something that can be eaten, standing in a bar, in two bites. I suppose pizza is equally consistent, and variable, and can be eaten while standing - but it is hard, unlike with a tramezzino, to get into a slice of hot pizza and think of anything else.
Then there are Venetian tramezzini, a subset of the genre: these are overstuffed, similarly soft, and in their fullness look like sleepy eyes peering out from under a duvet. They are more like dumplings than sandwiches. They look like eyebrow dormers - windows that lift their lids from the pitched roofs of Medieval thatched cottages, and were transplanted to later American homes.
Gabriele D’Annunzio, apparently, renamed these sandwiches tramezzini, to essentially redeem them - to take them away from backyard croquet in the Home Counties and place them squarely in Italy.
I wish I were in a little square in Venice right now, tramezzino in hand, glass of wine in the offing. Nothing would make me feel more rooted to that spot. Yet I find it funny that the word D’Annunzio chose is a diminutive of tramezzo, or in-between: in-between meals, in-between bread, or in-between worlds. Neither English, nor Italian. Or maybe both.