Tramezzino al Vitello Tonnato

The dish on the bar-counter triangle is older than the bread that carries it. Vitello tonnato is an early Piedmontese composed plate, cold roast veal under a pale tuna-and-anchovy sauce, published as a household recipe by Pellegrino Artusi in 1891 in his La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, recipe number 363. The Mulassano-style tramezzino arrived three decades later, in 1925. Where every other filling in the bar case is a salad or a spread invented for the bread, this one is a whole restaurant dish that has been picked up and folded inside the soft white frame, slice, sauce and capers intact.

The translation works because the plate already had its parts in the right order. The veal is the body. Lean cold poached roast contributes almost no fat. The tonnata is the carrier. Anchovy, oil-packed tuna, egg yolk and capers worked into an emulsion thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. The bread is the third element the plate never had. Without it, vitello tonnato is two solids that need each other on a fork. With it, the same pairing becomes a thing the hand can hold.

Each component has its specific way of going wrong. Cut the roast thick and it eats as a pale slab between bread, dragging out from the cut whole instead of yielding under the teeth. Boil the veal hard rather than poaching it gently and the meat goes grey and grainy with no give. Whip the tonnata loose or thin it with too much oil and the sauce slides off the meat onto the napkin within five minutes of assembly. Pack the capers whole and one bite gets a sour brine pulse while the next gets none. Use bread a day old and the crustless slice splits under the knife at the diagonal. The cook works against all five at once.

Lift one from a Turin bar case at five in the afternoon and the first thing is the weight. The triangle is heavier than the egg or tuna fillings in the same row, because cold roast veal carries dense protein the spreads do not. The cut face shows the cross-section, three pale layers: bread, veal, the off-white smear of tonnata under it, a fleck of caper here and there. Cool from the case, the bread gives soft against the thumb. First in the bite the crumb dissolves, then the sauce arrives savoury and oily and faintly fishy with a sharp caper pulse, then the cold veal lands lean and tender and faintly sweet. The temperature stays bar-case cool through the last swallow.

You order it by leaning toward the glass with one finger out and saying quello, il vitello tonnato, and paying two to three euros for it depending on the city. In Piedmontese bars in Turin and Asti it sits in the row beside the prosciutto and tuna and is read as the slightly grown-up choice, the filling for a customer who knows what is in it. The local idiom keeps both names alive. Vitello tonnato is the standard Italian; vitel tonné is the Piedmontese turn, sometimes still on Turin menus, and the historical guess in the region is that the dish was named to sound vaguely French at a time when French cuisine carried the prestige.

The closest filling-relations all hold the veal and change what dresses it. Drop the tonnata for a plain caper-and-mayonnaise smear and the sandwich loses the marine depth and becomes only cold roast on bread. Run the same tonnata across a tuna salad and you get a tuna tramezzino with no veal at all, an inversion rather than a variant. The traditional plate has its own internal split: an older Artusi-era version cooks the veal hard with the sauce ingredients in a single braise; the modern vitel tonné taught by Gualtiero Marchesi and others in the 1980s uses a gently poached roast and an emulsified raw-egg-yolk sauce, and it is this modern plated form that the bar triangle most often borrows.

A plated dish older than the triangle

The veal-and-tuna pairing is documented as a household dish in 1891. Pellegrino Artusi, the Forlì merchant whose self-published cookbook La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene came out in Florence in 1891 and ran to its definitive fifteenth edition in 1911, recorded the recipe at number 363 as a summer dish to be served cold; his sauce was built on capers, anchovy and tuna ground together with the cooking liquid. The pairing was a Piedmontese kitchen idea earlier than that. The food historians Anna Del Conte and Massimo Alberini both trace cold-veal-under-fish-sauce recipes in Lombard and Piedmontese manuscripts to the early nineteenth century, the sauce sometimes a pounded one and sometimes a thinner condiment, the tuna sometimes salted rather than oil-packed.

The bread that carries it is younger by a generation. The tramezzino was devised in 1925 by the Nebiolo couple, Angela and Onorino, returning Italian emigrants who had run restaurants in Detroit before settling at the Mulassano café on Piazza Castello in Turin. Their assembly trimmed the crusts, dropped the toasting common to the imported English toast sandwich, and fitted a Piedmontese restaurant filling between two slices of soft white loaf. Vitello tonnato sat on every Piedmontese restaurant menu of the period and was the obvious filling for the new bread, a composed dish condensed onto a triangle that could be eaten standing.

The plated form earned its own modern register in 2017, when the Italian agriculture ministry's PAT list of traditional regional products added vitello tonnato to the inventory of Piedmont. The dish was already roughly 130 years old in print by then. Caffè Mulassano on Piazza Castello in Turin still carries the veal-tonnata triangle in the same row of crustless soft squares it began with, three euros each.