Prosciutto and melon panzanella, when two classics collide

At the market, we pick a melon. I search for a round, unblemished one, I lift it. It’s heavy, and the heady smell is sweet and gently spiced. A two-minute walk and I’m at the butcher. I go straight to the charcuterie counter, and I point to the prosciutto Toscano nestled between a salami and a wedge of pecorino. Stefania, the butcher’s wife, is at the slicer. She knows I like prosciutto Toscano well aged, marbled, thinly sliced, with the creamy white fat crowning each slice.

When ingredients are so good and the summer is so hot, cooking is basically assembling seasonal ingredients. Prosciutto e melone, the quintessential Italian summer recipe, is one of the best examples.

Pellegrino Artusi, the cookbook writer considered among the fathers of the Italian cuisine, is the first to mention melone e prosciutto as appetizer in one of his August menus in his 1891 book La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene. (To be precise, Artusi mentions popone col prosciutto, as melons in the Tuscan dialect are known mainly as poponi). After that, there were no mentions of prosciutto e melone in cookbooks until the ‘60s.

For me, it is the easy, lazy, quick dinner of my childhood summers, when you would need a maximum of 5 minutes to arrange the sliced prosciutto Toscano on a platter and the thick, sweet melon wedges on a cutting board. Now, prosciutto e melone is one of the most appreciated appetizers during my cooking classes. As soon as I spot the first ripe melons at the market, the association comes naturally: we’re also getting some prosciutto at the butcher, and the appetizers are set.

Lately, though, as with every classic, there’s a tendency on making a gourmet version of prosciutto e melone: you can spot it in fine dining restaurants and trattorias menus presented as finger food, where the melon is turned into panna cotta or jelly, cut into fancy, unusual shape, or blended into a gazpacho. I’m old-fashioned, and I love nothing more than a large platter of crescent-shaped melon wedges – seeds and peel removed, please -, with paper-thin slices of prosciutto crudo draped on top. The occasional crack of black pepper and drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, or fresh basil leaves, are the only potential additions to a combination that is perfect in its purest form.

On a hot summer afternoon, though, while tidying up after a cooking class, I found myself nibbling at some leftovers and I had a brainwave born from the casual pairing of prosciutto and melone and another classic Tuscan summer dish, probably the most iconic, panzanella.

Panzanella is a stale bread salad rich with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and fresh basil leaves, dressed with extra virgin olive oil and vinegar. During this sultry summer, I ate my weight in panzanella: it doesn’t require cooking, just a bunch of seasonal ingredients and pantry staples, it is filling, and refreshing, and it helped me upcycle the large quantity of stale bread I accumulated over the weeks, while I was twitching my basic recipe for sourdough bread.

The sweet and salty flavours of prosciutto and melon mingled with the vinegary, aromatic notes of panzanella, and right there, standing at the counter of my messy kitchen, this new dish was born.

The best bread for this salad is a crusty country-style loaf. Over the years, using whatever day-old bread I had at hand, I came to love panzanella made with rustic, sourdough bread, even better when the bread was made with whole wheat flour or a combination of different stone ground flours.

Prosciutto and melon panzanella

Recipe in collaboration with Consorzio Melone Mantovano PGI

A couple of years ago, my father-in-law – renowned for being the food hunter of the family – brought us a box of melons from Mantua, and stated that those were the best melons you could find in Italy. They were sweet, juicy, and slightly spiced.

I was therefore extremely excited when the Melone Mantovano PGI consortium contacted us to develop two recipes with their products. The consortium gathers farmers in the province of Mantua and in the neighbouring provinces of Cremona, Modena, Bologna, and Ferrara, a land devoted to melon farming for centuries.

The melons produced, all with sweet, orange flesh, include a melon with smooth skin, one with the typical netted peel, and the most common one, with netted skin already marked into slices.

All very versatile in the kitchen, for sweet and savoury summer recipes, today I chose the smooth-skinned melon to make my panzanella. It is the most widely used in restaurant kitchens by chefs as this melon is intensely aromatic, the ideal fruit to take the panzanella, a simple, Cucina povera dish, to the next level.

A late summer Tuscan menu

What could you serve along with this fresh prosciutto and melon panzanella? Here you can find a couple of ideas for your late summer Tuscan menu.

• Green bean and potato salad. A cross between a green bean salad and a potato salad, this is my go-to dish for the summer, perfumed with fresh basil and dressed with peppery olive oil. Cook this in large quantities because it has everything you want in a summer side dish.
• Baked eggplants. Eggplants, of course, either the round purple ones or those thin long ones, then breadcrumbs, parsley, capers, garlic and some grated Parmigiano. There it was, my forgiving recipe, thick slices of eggplants topped with boldly flavoured breadcrumbs, roasted in the oven until golden and crisp. 
• Torta di verdura coi becchi. A surprising sweet Swiss chard tart from Lucca, a delicately sweet, spiced cake. It might sound off-putting, but once you get past the green filling, which may immediately remind you of a savoury preparation, you’ll be surprised with a delicately sweet, spiced cake. The predominant flavours are pine nuts and raisins—typical of Italian desserts—candied citron or orange peel and a waft of cinnamon and nutmeg. The chard creates a moist, creamy texture once mixed with milk-soaked breadcrumbs and leaves a faint, herbal note. From the newsletter archive [paywalled content].

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