Tramezzino Uovo e Maionese

Chopped hard-cooked egg, mayonnaise, a pinch of salt, soft white bread: a cook can count every part of this tramezzino on one hand. That short list is the sandwich. The egg, hard-cooked and chopped, brings the body and a faint sulphur note; the mayonnaise binds it into a smooth mass and films the crumb against it; the pancarrè, soft and crustless, is the pale frame. It is the egg tramezzino pared to two ingredients on a slice of bread, and that paring is also a wager, because there is nothing in the fill to cover a fault.

Get the egg wrong and the cut face shows it at once. Boil the eggs a few minutes too long and the yolks chalk over with a grey-green ring and the bite crumbles to dust. Loosen the bind with too much mayonnaise and the fill turns to wet slop that soaks the base slice and slumps out of the diagonal when the triangle is lifted. Skimp on it and the egg sheds crumbs the moment the knife passes. Leave the bread open to the air and it stiffens and splits under the blade. A careful one cooks the yolk through but tender, chops the egg small enough to hold yet not to a paste, and mounds the fill so the cut triangle domes.

Hold a chilled one and there is almost nothing to it, a soft yielding triangle weighing little more than the bread itself. The teeth pass through a cool dry crumb, meet a thin trace of the bind, and reach the egg salad: mild, smooth, faintly rich, the chopped yolk lending a soft grain under the cream and the low sulphur note settling behind it. Nothing is warm, nothing is sharp, everything stays cool and quiet on the tongue, which is exactly the texture a Venetian bar regular reaches for at eleven in the morning beside a spritz.

You buy it the way the whole case is bought, by pointing through the curved glass. The egg-and-mayonnaise triangle sits among the tuna and the prosciutto in a bar across the Veneto, and a customer indicates it, hands over a coin or two, and eats it standing at the counter from a paper napkin. It is one of the cheapest fillings in the row, the plain everyday pick a regular takes without a second look, and it needs no word with a cook, since the fill is built and there is nothing to add on request.

Its close cousins each take this plain fill and complicate it. The nearest, the egg-and-anchovy tramezzino, threads cured anchovy through the same egg for a salt and a marine depth this one does without; fold in tuna and the fill turns marine and denser; thread a little mustard through and a sharp lift appears; lay tomato or lettuce against it and a wetness and a crunch arrive that shift the whole balance. None is a variant of the plain egg-and-mayonnaise build so much as a sibling that adds back what this one leaves out.

The Plain Egg on a Turin Form

No inventor and no founding shop attaches to this filling. Egg bound with mayonnaise is among the plainest things a kitchen makes, and putting it in a soft triangle is the obvious meeting of a cheap fill and a ready form; the record ties it to no particular bar. The form it rides in, though, has a precise birth. The Mulassano caffè on Turin's Piazza Castello began cutting these small, untoasted, crust-trimmed sandwiches in 1925, the owners Angela De Michelis and Onorino Nebiolo having returned from a stretch in the United States with the habit, and built them on the pale boxed loaf Turin bakeries were already turning out.

The name came later and from a writer. Gabriele D'Annunzio, reaching for an Italian word to retire the English "sandwich", shaped tramezzino from tramezzo, a partition, and the coinage settled into everyday Italian through the 1930s. Italy's agriculture ministry opened a national inventory of traditional regional foods in 1999, the PAT list, and entered the Piedmontese tramezzino on it; the plain egg-and-mayonnaise build earns no separate line and leans on the record of the parent form.

The egg-and-mayonnaise version is one of the plainer fillings that later filled out the same crustless triangle, a cheap everyday choice riding a form whose own opening filling was something else. The detail that fixes that form hardest is the one the egg cannot claim: the very first tramezzino documented at the Mulassano counter in 1925 was not egg but butter and anchovy.