By Nicholas Velletri
One of my earliest food memories and the food that reminds me most of my nonno is a simple “panino con la mortadella” or a mortadella roll. When I was very young, we visited my family in Italy and stayed with my grandparents. The bread my nonno used to buy was a rosetta bread roll, it has a very small amount of crumb and is extremely light and fluffy inside. The crust of this bread is hard and the benefit of there being only a small amount of crumb and lots of air, is that there is plenty of room to stuff it full of mortadella. The secret in what made the rolls taste so good was not just the quantity of the mortadella but also the way that my nonno made the deli slice the meat. It was shaved as thin as it possibly could be, while staying in one piece. Today, just the thought of the smell that came from that freshly wrapped mortadella in the deli paper is enough to make my mouth begin to water.
I would eat this every morning for breakfast while we stayed with them and my nonno would travel to the shops down the road every single morning to buy the freshest bread and the freshest cut mortadella. I ate it so much, and I’m not sure if these two things are related, that at one point there was a morning when no stores in the entire town had any mortadella. My nonno however, was a man who would go to any lengths for his family, and he actually drove around for an hour to the surrounding towns from shop to shop until he found a place that had mortadella for my breakfast. The flavour and smell of fresh cut mortadella always take me back to the time of sitting in my nonna’s kitchen, watching cartoons and eating a panino, and more importantly it always reminds me of my grandparents and the lengths that they would go to, to make us happy.