PMT, panini

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:14 PM -0400 8/15/02, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>PMT
>   The Naples 45 restaurant in Grand Central Terminal offers a PMT, of parma,
>mozzarella, tomato and arugula.  I haven't seen PMT anywhere else; it's
>certainly not a BLT yet.
>
This is the sort of sandwich that would be (on the right sort of
Italian bread) even better as a panino, which is a concept now
sweeping the country, we're told by the Times.  This is a grilled
sandwich, which can be made either in an expensive device
manufactured for that purpose, or (as I can testify, indeed for the
above sandwich except with ordinary non-Parma ham) in one's own
dusted-off waffle iron that one probably received as a wedding
present.  Actually, the Times just uses the plural, panini, evidently
no relation to the great Sanskrit grammarian of (essentially) the
same name, whose own eponymous sandwiches would be quite stale by
now.  Around the Northeast, I've seen "panini" more often than
"panino", but I urge everyone to avoid wimping out ("I'll have one of
those panini")--keep the singular alive, lest it end up as endangered
as the spaghetto or the raviolo.

Larry