Tramezzino Uovo e Acciughe

Lift the egg-and-anchovy tramezzino from a bar case and the cut face gives almost nothing away: a pale yellow egg salad, a soft crustless triangle, no visible trace of fish at all. The anchovy is the cured fillet or its paste, salt-packed and intensely savoury, and the success of the build comes down to how sparingly the cook reaches for it. The egg is hard-cooked and chopped, faintly sulfurous and rich, mayonnaise-bound into a pale spreadable mass that lends the sandwich both its body and its calm. The anchovy does not perch on top of that mass. It threads through the underside of it, a low marine current that reaches a depth of salt and umami the egg simply cannot get to alone. The egg does the carrying; the anchovy does the deepening.

A good one is an exercise in dosing something strong. Reach too far and the triangle is brine. Hold back too much and it is bare egg salad. Judge it right and the fish vanishes into a depth the egg could never have managed by itself. The eggs want to be cooked through but not chalky, the yolks set and still tender with no grey ring, chopped fine enough to bind and coarse enough to keep a trace of texture. The anchovy is worked in small: mashed into the mayonnaise, or laid as thin fillets and chopped through the mix, never piled, because a heavy hand erases everything the egg was doing. Enough mayonnaise goes in to bring the mass into a clean cohering spread, and that bind also films the inner faces of the pancarrè so the bread stays dry until it is eaten. The mass is mounded toward the centre so the cut triangle domes.

The ways it fails cluster around salt and around moisture. Anchovy chopped through unevenly leaves one corner sharp and the rest tasting of nothing but yolk. Overcooked eggs turn chalky and the yolk crumbles to dust in the bite. Bread left open to the air stiffens and splits under the knife. A bind too loose and the egg slumps out of the diagonal as the sandwich is lifted; a bind too thin and the egg's own moisture seeps into the base slice. A working version carries the cure as one even thread through the egg, balances the added salt against the anchovy already in the mix, and cuts to a diagonal that stands upright over a domed pale centre.

Take one chilled from the case and the bread yields soft under the fingers. The bite opens on a cool dry crumb and the faint slick of the bind, then the egg salad spreads smooth and mild and a little rich, and a beat behind it the anchovy makes itself felt, not as a separate fish but as a deep savoury pull beneath the egg, a saltiness with a marine edge that the mayonnaise rounds off at the corners. The temperature holds cool throughout. Nothing in the bite is sharp or hot; the anchovy registers as depth rather than as a loud cured fillet, which is exactly the dose behaving as it should.

Buying it means doing what every tramezzino asks, which is to point. The egg-and-anchovy triangle stands in the curved glass case of a bar in Venice, Turin or Bologna among the tuna and the prosciutto; the customer indicates it through the glass, hands over a coin or two, and carries it to the counter wrapped in a paper napkin to eat on their feet beside a small vermouth or a spritz. It is plain aperitivo food, one of the cheaper fillings in the row, and it needs no negotiating at the counter: the cured fish is built in, not added on request.

Close cousins keep the egg base and change the partner. Drop the anchovy for plain mayonnaise and the result is the simplest egg tramezzino, calm and uncured. Fold tuna into the egg and the marine note shifts to flaked fish rather than a cured slick. Stir capers through alongside and the salt sharpens to a brighter point. Lay the egg with tomato or lettuce and the moisture and the crunch remake the build entirely. The plain egg tramezzino is the quiet baseline; the egg-and-anchovy version is that baseline drawn out to sea by a small and carefully judged hand.

A 1925 form, an old pairing

The tramezzino as a form traces to one Turin caffè. Angela and Onorino Nebiolo, a couple back from running restaurants in Detroit, bought Mulassano on Piazza Castello in 1925, and there they cut a sandwich with no toasting and the crust pared away, built on a soft white loaf the city's bakers were already baking by the box. Its name was a later gift from the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio: he took the Italian word for a partition, tramezzo, and shaped tramezzino from it, and that coinage became the everyday Italian name across the following decade.

The egg-and-anchovy filling sits unusually near the form's beginning. The first tramezzino documented at the Mulassano counter was butter and anchovy, so the cured fish was present at the very start of the form; the egg-and-anchovy build marries that founding anchovy to a mayonnaise-bound egg salad, a combination Italian and broader Mediterranean cooking had long used in other dishes. No single shop holds a documented claim to the specific egg-and-anchovy tramezzino.

Italy's agriculture ministry keeps a national inventory of traditional regional foods, the PAT list, opened in 1999, and the Piedmontese tramezzino is entered on it. The egg-and-anchovy build has no separate line of its own, resting instead on the documentation of the broader form. The cured anchovy that this version threads through its egg was already on the very first tramezzino served at Mulassano in Turin in 1925.