Cudighi Sandwich

This is the thing itself. The first one I ever ate came from Tino’s Bar and Pizza in Negaunee, in the summer of 2010. I had Chris — my German exchange student, from Hamburg — and his girlfriend, now his wife, along with me, and the whole point of the trip was feeding them things they had never had and in most cases had never heard of. A cudighi qualifies twice over: it isn’t German, it isn’t American in any way they’d have recognized, and it barely exists outside three towns in Michigan. We all ordered one. It hooked me on the spot. (Pasties are on the list for the same reason — that’s coming.)

A cudighi sandwich is a patty of sweet-spiced northern-Italian pork sausage on a hard roll, under melted mozzarella and pizza sauce, usually with onions and often green pepper and mushroom. It is a Marquette County institution and almost unknown outside it. Ask for one downstate and you’ll get a blank look.

The form has changed once, decisively. Mario Gallizioli’s original in 1936 was sausage on a bun with chopped onions, ketchup, and mustard — no cheese, no tomato sauce, closer to a hot dog than to anything Italian. Mozzarella and pizza sauce arrived after the Second World War, when the pizza boom hit the U.P.’s bar-and-pizza places and reshaped the sandwich into what everyone means today.

So when people argue about mustard versus mozzarella, both sides are right. They’re just loyal to different decades. I’ve written both below.

Ingredients

• The sausage
• 4 patties Sausage, Cudighi, about 4 oz each — or Vollwerth’s cudighi patties
• The modern build
• 4 hard rolls or hoagie buns, split
• 8 oz mozzarella, sliced or shredded (low-moisture)
• 1 cup pizza sauce, warmed
• 1 medium yellow onion, sliced
• 1 green bell pepper, sliced (optional)
• 4 oz mushrooms, sliced (optional)

Olive oil for the pan

• The 1936 build, instead of the above
• 4 soft buns
• Chopped raw yellow onion
• Yellow mustard
• Ketchup

Directions

Key ingredients

Sausage, Cudighi

Mustard

1. Press the patties wide:
2. Press each patty noticeably wider than the roll — a good half inch past the edge all around. Sausage this fatty shrinks a lot, and a patty that started bun-sized ends up a disappointing disc floating in the middle of the bread.
3. Cook the vegetables first:
4. Sweat the onion in a little olive oil over medium heat until soft and just starting to color, 8–10 minutes; add the pepper and mushrooms partway if you’re using them. Set aside and keep warm. Doing this first means you cook the sausage in a pan that already has onion in it, which is not a loss.
5. Fry the patties:
6. Medium heat, cast iron, 4–5 minutes a side, to 160 °F internal. Don’t press them and don’t rush the heat — the spices carry sugar and will scorch bitter over a hot pan before the center is done.
7. Melt the cheese onto the patty, not the bun:
8. Lay the mozzarella over each patty in the pan in the last minute, cover, and let it melt there. Cheese melted onto the meat binds the sandwich; cheese melted onto the bread slides off on the first bite.
9. Warm the roll:
10. Split and toast the roll cut-side down in the same pan for 30 seconds. It needs the structure — a soft bun collapses under sauce.
11. Build:
12. Sauce on the bottom half, then the patty with its melted cheese, then the onions and peppers, then a little more sauce on top. Serve immediately; this is not a sandwich that waits.
13. Or build it the 1936 way:
14. Sausage on a soft bun, a heap of chopped raw onion, yellow mustard, and ketchup. Nothing else. Try it once before deciding it sounds wrong — the mustard against the cinnamon and clove is genuinely good, and it is what the sandwich was for its first decade.

Notes

Where to eat one

The cudighi belt is essentially Marquette County — Negaunee, Ishpeming, Marquette. Status as of July 2026, and I’d call ahead, because small U.P. restaurants change faster than their websites do:

• Tino’s Bar and Pizza — 220 Iron St, Negaunee. Open, 4–11 pm daily. Sausage patty on a bun with pizza sauce, onion, and mozzarella, from a secret family recipe. Family owned; John and Theresa Argall bought it in 1982. This is where I had my first one. (Note: Travel Marquette’s listing places Tino’s in Marquette — that’s an error. It’s Negaunee.)
• Congress Pizza — Marquette. The Bonetti family’s, with a cudighi recipe described as essentially unchanged since 1957.
• Lawry’s Pasty Shop — Marquette and Ishpeming. Serving since 1946; homemade sausage on a hoagie roll with mozzarella and tomato sauce.
• Vango’s Pizza & Cocktail Lounge — Marquette.
• Casa Calabria, The Dry Dock, Togo’s — Marquette.
• Jean Kay’s Pasties & Subs — Marquette. The Ishpeming location is reported closed as of 2022; the Marquette one appears to still be serving. Unconfirmed.
• Ralph’s Italian Deli — Ishpeming. Almost certainly closed. It reopened in February 2023 under Bruno Gervasi after a renovation, then was reported closing at the end of September 2024. I found no evidence either way after that. Don’t drive there without calling.

A genuine shop-by-shop comparison of how each one seasons its cudighi doesn’t exist in any source I could reach. That would take either Magnaghi’s 2022 book or a week of very enjoyable fieldwork.

The mustard question

This is a real generational split, not a mistake in the sources.

Onions, mustard, and ketchup is the documented 1936 original. Mozzarella and pizza sauce is the post-war form and what essentially every shop serves now. Partisans of mustard are historically correct; partisans of mozzarella are defending eighty unbroken years of practice. Both are authentic — to different decades. It’s a documented evolution, not a right-and-wrong argument, and the likely hinge is Gallizioli’s son’s post-war restaurant, opened into an America that had just discovered pizza.

Building notes

The roll matters more than you’d think. A long hard roll or a sturdy hoagie. The sandwich carries warm sauce and rendered fat, and a soft bun turns to paste. Toasting the cut face is not optional.

Patty, not links. Links are how cudighi is often eaten at home and on the grill, but the sandwich in Marquette County is a patty. A split link in a bun eats unevenly and rolls out the back.

Sauce is pizza sauce, not marinara. Thicker, less sweet, less herby. Marinara is looser and will run straight through the roll.

Don’t add fennel or Italian seasoning to the sauce. The sausage is doing something specific and unusual with cinnamon and clove, and a heavily oreganoed sauce fights it. Keep the sauce plain and let the spice come from the meat.

The history

The full origin, the 1887–88 Lombard migration onto the Iron Range, and the Bergamasque etymology of the word “cudighi” — including why the usual “it comes from cotechino” explanation is wrong as normally told — are all in the Notes of Sausage, Cudighi. Worth reading before you make either one.