Mortadella has been flapping around London for over a year now. It is pink and ubiquitous.

Before the pandemic, you might have occasionally found it folded up on a plate, surrounded by olives and soft cheese, but since coronavirus arrived it has been everywhere, usually inside thick slices of focaccia.

Italian duo Enzo Mirto and Elia Sebregondi, who founded the East London restaurant Officina 00, tell me the capital has fostered inventiveness.

“The real novelty is mortadella’s combination with focaccia,” Elia says.” We tend to see mortadella as the tradition and with focaccia, the modern innovation.”

Nobody requires reams of tedious data to understand this sudden proclivity towards sandwiches. For the past 12 months, restaurants have been closed more than they’ve been open—or at least peppered with restrictions—and sandwiches are the archetypal takeaway food. They travel well, are efficient platforms for constrained creativity, and are tempered by their affordability.

What better time for mortadella to become synonymous with the capital’s dining scene? The Italian salumi squeezes so comfortably into bread—how beautiful it is thrust inside two well-oiled focaccia mattresses and curled between them like fine cotton sheets. There is probably no better meal available right now.

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Those who call it “luncheon meat” and compare the Bolognan staple to Billy Bear ham (granted, a lookalike, and a mainstay of countless school lunch boxes, but there the comparison ends) must believe the cheese in Dairylea Lunchables is aged Comte, and that seafood sticks are shafts of Maine lobster.

I’ll let Enzo explain: “While mortadella’s appearance might look unsophisticated, actually, its preparation requires a lot of different phases: sourcing, mincing, seasoning with many spices, moulding and cooking with 72 hours smoking at very low temperature, adding wood to the furnace piece by piece, which is what gives it the special pinkish colour.”

One chef early to the mortadella trend is Chris Leach, who makes his own at his Soho restaurant Manteca. It comes unguarded as a starter or a side dish and is by far the most suggestive reminder of Bologna streets where the meat is paraded as if royalty. Chris adds 20 spices to his mortadella, including classics like mace and nutmeg; and mustard, which is a more recent inclusion.

““How beautiful it is thrust inside two well-oiled focaccia mattresses and curled between them like fine cotton sheets.””

“I’ve been making mortadella for about 4 to 5 years,” he tells me. “It has quite a complex flavour but it’s also easy and versatile. Maybe it does remind people of the ham they used to have in their sandwiches at school—there is a familiar edge. But it’s also different and interesting.”

“Obviously, sandwiches have been such a huge thing in lockdown,” he continues. “They’re the perfect takeaway food. It’s good to see mortadella has been taken on and is so popular right now.”

Mortadella is significantly different to better-known charcuterie and salumi in that it is cooked. At Manteca, Chris makes his using the traditional method, breaking down a whole pig and mixing 75 per cent leg meat with 25 per cent back fat, then chilling, blending, adding ice, and grinding it all up another five times.

This process brings about mortadella’s “characteristically smooth flavour,” Chris says. The ice helps it all emulsify; adding black peppercorns and fennel seeds provide a supportive kick.

“We stuff it into a cow’s intestine. This is the genius of Italian cooking,” he adds. “It’s really medieval in a lot of ways. Bologna is one of the best food cities I’ve ever been to and mortadella is on every plate. They’re fearfully proud of it.”

Two years ago I wandered Bologna’s ancient streets and mortadella always preceded bowls of tortellini in brodo, the typical pasta-in-soup dish of the city. To the meat, some butchers will add pistachios, fanciful as they are, for a more luxury appeal. After all, mortadella is a peasant’s meat. Its favoured wine, Lambrusco, is a peasant’s drink.

That’s not to say mortadella doesn’t hold weight and isn’t valued. Phil Bracey, co-owner of P Franco and sister restaurant Bright tells me quality should be savoured.

“A lot of people view mortadella as a cheap, poor quality meat, which I think isn’t correct,” he says.

“People think there’s a ceiling as to what you can charge for it. I think that’s bollocks. A lot of mortadella is quality meat—it’s about looking carefully and sourcing properly. We charged £7 for 100g of sliced mortadella in lockdown one and people were kicking off about the price. But I don’t agree it should always be the cheapest thing.”

Phil’s output predates the lockdown trend. In 2014, the first mortadella party was held at P Franco, and in more recent years, Bright hosted the event. Each year, the Italian farmer and winemaker Frederico Orsi’s prime mortadella was shipped over from Bologna and honoured. Orsi, an eccentric Italian who lets his pigs roam free in the woods and adds nothing but salt, pepper, and a splash of homemade wine to his preparation, is perhaps the maker of some of the best.

“He’s got quite a mad farm, but produces some of the best mortadella around. We always try to have fun,” he adds. “We had to pause the parties because of Covid, but they’ll be back.”

I wonder whether Phil resents mortadella’s sudden trajectory toward the mainstream, where before it was a novel envoûtement, safely preserved in the hat-tipping food world.

“There must be an appetite for it now that we didn’t realise,” Phil says. “It’s not always been a perpetual success on our menus, but it’s been on occasionally. I hope it retains some of its novel value and there isn’t a race to the bottom. But hey, I hope more people come to love it. I completely understand why a bunch of people have started selling it and it’s cool that it’s become so popular.”

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Is there a danger mortadella might be lost to obsessiveness? ‘Nduja was introduced to most British palates by Pizza Express, and for about half a decade now, burrata has been on hundreds of menus.

Neither of these points is a bad thing. Both ingredients remain exceptional in design. But with popularity comes the greater risk of encountering poor quality. Increasingly, I have encountered woefully poor burrata. Covering it in okay olive oil and hazelnuts does not detract from its inadequacy.

““People think there’s a ceiling as to what you can charge for it. I think that’s bollocks.””

— Phil Bracey, P Franco

“Mortadella photographs well in sandwiches,” Manteca’s Chris Leach says. “It is brilliant to see it get popular but it’d be a shame if it becomes the new burrata—becomes too ‘in’ and gets bastardised. If chains see it catching on, they might end up buying cheap stuff in plastic packaging and selling it on not very good focaccia.”

At Ombra, in Hackney, mortadella has not suffered, and customers are willing to pay a premium to buy it by the slice or have it ready to eat in its now customary focaccia, which at Ombra is homemade.

Mitshel Ibrahim, the restaurant’s chef-owner, serves his mortadella without any accompaniment, not even a squeeze of lemon.

“It works so well in a sandwich. It’s effortless. Some people like to add other things but we leave it as it comes—mortadella in homemade focaccia. It’s simple and there isn’t any need to mess around,” Mitshel says. “In Bologna, you see butchers shops next to bakeries. It makes a lot of sense to throw mortadella in bread.

“You can enrich mortadella with pistachios, truffle. It gives it prestige and value. But British people relate to it without, too. It’s a consistent product that isn’t expensive.”

At Ombra, Ibrahim has been selling around 60 sandwiches a week in lockdown. “The volume we go through means it would be unsustainable to make our own mortadella—we don’t have the time to ensure the quality we need. But there are very good Italian importers. We use about 7kg a week.”

And the chef thinks the trend will outlive the pandemic. “I can imagine longevity, mortadella lasting beyond lockdown. It’s been a discovery but now it’s been discovered there isn’t any reason for it to go.”

There isn’t. Mortadella is here to stay. Focaccia too. If coronavirus has taught us anything, we really don’t need to skip down to Marks & Spencer any more to buy prawn sandwiches in dry bread. They are lubricated only by cheap mayonnaise and taste like Brexit. All we need do now is place a few slices of mortadella between focaccia and post-pandemic homes and offices will be all the more interesting for it.