Tramezzino Uovo e Maionese

Chopped hard-cooked egg, mayonnaise, a pinch of salt, soft white bread: a cook can count every component of this tramezzino on one hand and have fingers left over. The shortness of that list is the whole sandwich. The egg is hard-cooked and chopped, bringing the body, a gentle richness, a faint sulfur note. The mayonnaise binds the chopped egg into a smooth cohesive mass and films the crumb against it. The bread is soft crustless pancarrè, a pale tender frame and a mild backdrop. Nothing is asked to do a job the other parts cannot, and nothing is added to cover for anything. It is the egg tramezzino reduced to two ingredients and a slice of bread.

That reduction is also an exposure. There is no anchovy threaded through to lend the egg a cured depth, no tuna folded in to turn it marine, no caper to sharpen it, no leaf to cut it. With nothing else in the fill, there is nowhere for a fault to hide. The egg has to be cooked right and the bind judged exactly, because no second flavour will paper over chalky yolk or a slack soaked crumb. Take the mayonnaise away and the chopped egg is dry rubble that will not hold a triangle. Take the egg away and the mayonnaise is a smear of fat on bread. The two need each other and, pointedly, almost nothing else.

It fails in ways that are unmistakable on the cut face. Boil the eggs too long and the yolks go chalky with a grey-green ring, and the bite crumbles to dust. Overdo the mayonnaise and the fill turns to a loose wet slop that soaks through the base slice and slumps out of the diagonal when the triangle is lifted. Underdo it and the egg will not cohere, shedding crumbs the moment the sandwich is cut. Leave the bread open to the air and it stiffens and splits under the knife. A careful one cooks the yolk through but still tender, chops the egg small enough to cohere yet not to a paste, works in just enough mayonnaise for a spreadable mass, films the inner faces of the bread, 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 two slices of bread. The teeth pass through a cool dry crumb, meet a thin trace of the bind, and reach the egg salad, mild and smooth and faintly rich on the tongue, the chopped yolk lending a soft grain under the creaminess and the egg's low sulfur note settled behind that. Everything stays cool, none of it warm, none of it sharp, nothing in the mouthful announcing itself. It is plain and soft and gently rich, and it asks for no further notes because none were built in.

It is bought the way the whole tramezzino 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 beside a spritz or a vermouth. It is squarely one of the cheapest fillings in the row, the plain everyday choice, the triangle a regular takes without a second look. It needs no exchange with a cook; the fill is built in and there is nothing to add on request.

Its close cousins each take this plain base and complicate it. Stir cured anchovy through the egg and a salt and a marine depth arrive that this build deliberately does without, a different sandwich entirely. Fold tuna into the egg and the fill turns marine and denser. Thread a little mustard through and a sharp lift appears past anything in the plain version. Lay tomato or lettuce against the egg and a wetness and a crunch arrive that change the whole balance. Not one counts as a variant of the egg-and-mayonnaise tramezzino; each is a sibling that adds back what this one leaves out, and the plain build is the baseline the others are all read against.

The plain egg filling on a 1925 form

No inventor and no founding shop attaches to this filling. Egg bound with mayonnaise is among the plainest things a kitchen can make, and a tramezzino of it is the obvious meeting of a cheap fill and the soft triangle; the record attaches the build to no particular bar.

The form it rides in has a precise origin. In 1925 the married owners of the Mulassano caffè on Turin's Piazza Castello, Angela De Michelis and Onorino Nebiolo, back in Italy after a stretch living in America, put on their counter a small soft sandwich with no toasting and the crust trimmed clean away, built on the pale boxed loaf the Turin bakeries were already turning out. The first filling documented there was butter and anchovy.

The name was a later addition. The writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, wanting an Italian word in place of the English sandwich, coined tramezzino from tramezzo, meaning a partition, and it became the everyday term through the 1930s. A national inventory of traditional regional foods, started by the Italian agriculture ministry in 1999, lists the tramezzino among the recognised products of Piedmont; the plain egg-and-mayonnaise build earns no listing of its own and leans on the record of the parent form, a Turin invention of 1925.