Focaccia Genovese with Mortadella

In Genoa, focaccia is not bread. It is a category unto itself, baked in great sheets in bakeries that have made nothing else for generations. The dough is wet, nearly a batter, stretched into pans slicked with enough olive oil to make cautious cooks nervous. The dimples hold pools of oil that fry the surface while the interior stays soft. The bottom crisps against the hot pan. The top blisters with salt.

Mortadella is the great pork sausage of Bologna, two hundred kilometers east. Ground so fine it becomes a mousse, studded with cubes of pure white fat, sometimes pistachios, scented with myrtle and coriander. It is not the rubbery pink disk that Americans call bologna. That insult shares only a name.

This sandwich requires no sauce, no cheese, no lettuce or tomato. The focaccia, still warm from the oven or cooled to room temperature, provides richness and texture. The mortadella provides pork fat and aromatic depth. What you keep out is as significant as what you put in. The Genovese and the Bolognese understood this long before either of us arrived.