At the half-way point in our stay, we make a pilgrimage to Bologna.
From San Marino it’s about an hour by car. We plan to arrive a little after the morning rush hour. At the airport we turn in the rental we’ve been driving for three weeks and pick up another car for the rest of our stay. Then, from the airport we drive into the city, park the car, and walk ten minutes directly to Enoteca Italiana on Via Malcontenti. Later we’ll get to Piazza Maggiore, pass by the Neptune fountain, stand in awe in front of San Petronio, the 13th century cathedral, and fade into the Quadrilatero section to stock up on sweets. But first and foremost, we’re here for a baloney sandwich.
We make a special trip for a baloney sandwich.
You read that right. Except it’s not baloney, and it’s not bologna. It’s mortadella. At Enoteca Italiana, Gianni, working behind the counter, knows us now. Knows why we’re there. He slices two rolls, loads the mortadella onto the slicer, and produces a dozen paper-thin sheets of mortadella, which he lays in folds on the bread. Tizi has cappuccino. I ask him to choose a white wine for me, which he pours and refers to as “a breakfast wine.” We eat, we exclaim, we remark on the fine Italian tradition of the morning sandwich. Mostly we savor the mortadella.
To an American it may seem hard to believe that bologna could be considered a delicacy. In the US we think of bologna as a cheap meat-ish composite, like Spam. Eat it raw, eat it fried, eat it if you must, but how can you possibly like it? I grew up eating bologna sandwiches, after spreading French’s mustard on the meat. My dad enjoyed his bologna sandwich with mustard, peanut butter, and sliced pickles (sweet or dill, the denomination didn’t matter). The thinking was, bologna needed something. By itself it was not sufficient. It was cooked, en-tubed meat paste. It was filler. It needed help.
Bologna came to the US around the turn of the 20th century. It was cheap, an important detail through the years of the Great Depression. Sandwiches were becoming a thing in the US. In 1924 the New York Times announced “the day of sandwiches has arrived.” Bologna became bologna, like Kleenex became kleenex. And that shift in pronunciation occurred. Bologna became baloney. Types of bologna proliferated: Beef bologna, ring bologna, rag bologna, Lebanon bologna. Last year Americans purchased over 225 million pounds of bologna.
I have not always been a devotee. For a decade or so I stepped away from mortadella. We had been married for a while. Our relationship survived. I had decided there was a fat content I didn’t like.
“It’s just baloney,” I said to Tizi. “
“It’s not.”
“Baloney.”
“Don’t say that,” she said.
“My mother called it big baloney,” I told her. “She bought Ekrich baloney at Pat’s.”
Tizi’s reaction to this: Rage. We went back and forth. She said I was crazy.
Then I came back.
When I lift the top slice off my sandwich at the Enoteca, I notice the little white moons, which are pearls of lard. There is a fragrance. It gets in you.
This is not baloney. It’s beyond bologna. The morning of our sandwich, at the table next to us are four men, retirement age, who are enjoying life. They share a bottle of bubbly white wine, probably every morning. They have some small bites, their preferred morning sandwiches. When Tizi and I hold up our sandwiches, say good morning, tell them we love mortadella, they nod in agreement.
“What if we did this every morning?” I ask Tizi. “Would we get tired of it?”
“Ask them,” she says.
No.
Experience Bologna’s culinary delights with an authentic mortadella sandwich at Enoteca Italiana, blending tradition and flavor in every bite.