Focaccia sandwiches with mortadella and parmesan cream

It’s the time of year when the TV, balanced on an Ikea unit with castors and propped on wooden splints, is wheeled between the kitchen doors to face the terrace (flat roof). That seasonal move lends TV dinners another soundtrack — birds shouting, people chatting in the bar below, the held-down horn of the articulated lorry that can’t reach the supermarket because a car is double parked — and changes how we eat: wooden chairs, tea towels and plates on laps, focaccia sandwiches with mortadella and parmesan cream for the meat eaters, and parmesan cream, tomato and a handful of green leaves for those who don’t.

Mortadella is an insaccati parzialmente cotti, or partly cooked sausage, with a debated origin. Some trace the name to il mortaio (the mortar), others to a Roman sausage flavoured with myrtle, farcimen murtatum; a 12th-century mention probably referred to veal or donkey.

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