Vitello tonnato

Veal poached in white wine and aromatics, cooled completely, sliced as thin as you can manage, and covered with a pale sauce of tuna, anchovy and capers. Eaten cold.

Described like that it puts people off, which is a pity, because it is one of the best things Piedmont does and it is on every summer menu between Turin and Asti. The tuna does not read as fish once it is in the sauce; it reads as salt and depth, in the way an anchovy melted into a sauce does.

Artusi gives it at 363, and the sauce separately at 133, so the dish was already established enough to codify by 1891.

Ingredients

Serves 6 as a secondo, more as an antipasto.

The veal

	Metric	Imperial
Veal girello or eye of round, in one piece	900 g	2 lb
Dry white wine	500 ml	17 fl oz
Carrot, celery, onion	1 each	1 each
Bay, cloves, peppercorns	a few	a few
Salt	to taste	to taste

The sauce

	Metric	Imperial
Tuna in olive oil, drained	200 g	7 oz
Anchovy fillets	4	4
Capers, rinsed	40 g	1.5 oz
Egg yolks, hard boiled	3	3
Olive oil	150 ml	5 fl oz
Lemon juice	half a lemon	half a lemon
Some of the cooking liquid	as needed	as needed

The tuna comes in olive oil. That oil is part of the sauce, and tuna packed in brine or water gives a grey, thin, faintly metallic result.

Girello is the lean cylindrical cut that slices cleanly when cold. Anything fattier or looser falls apart under the knife.

Method

1. Bring the wine, vegetables and aromatics to a simmer with enough water to cover the veal. Salt it.
2. Lower the veal in and cook at the barest tremble for about an hour, until a skewer meets no resistance. Do not boil it.
3. Let it cool completely in its own liquid, several hours or overnight in the fridge. This is the step that decides whether the meat is moist.
4. Blend the tuna, anchovies, half the capers, the egg yolks and the lemon, then pour the oil in slowly until it is a smooth pale cream.
5. Loosen it with the cold cooking liquid until it pours slowly from a spoon.
6. Slice the veal as thin as you can, across the grain.
7. Lay the slices out overlapping, cover them completely with the sauce, and scatter the remaining capers. Chill at least two hours before serving.

What goes wrong

The meat is dry and grey. Boiled rather than poached, or lifted out of the liquid to cool. Both squeeze the water out of a lean cut that has none to spare.

It falls apart when sliced. Still warm, or the wrong cut, or sliced with the grain. Cold meat and a long thin blade.

The sauce is grainy or split. The oil went in too fast. Treat it like a mayonnaise even though the yolks are cooked.

It tastes overwhelmingly of fish. Too much anchovy, or tuna in brine. The tuna should sit behind the capers rather than in front of them.

It is bland the next day. Unlikely, and the opposite is the usual problem: capers and anchovy keep developing, so season lightly and taste before serving.

Why it works

Poaching a lean cut in a liquid it then cools in is the whole technique. Muscle fibres contract and expel moisture as they heat, and cooling in the liquid lets some of that come back; lifting the meat out onto a plate to cool loses it for good.

The sauce is an emulsion held by hard-boiled yolks instead of raw ones, which is why it can sit dressed on the meat for hours in a fridge without weeping. The older Piedmontese versions bind it this way; the modern shortcut uses mayonnaise, which is quicker, softer and sweeter, and is what most restaurants serve.

At the table

A summer dish, served cold, and usually as an antipasto despite being meat. In Piedmont it also turns up at Christmas, which confuses the seasonal logic and is simply how it is.

It is made the day before by design. Everything improves overnight and nothing has to be done at the last minute, which is why it appears at family lunches where twelve people are expected.

Bread, and nothing else on the plate. No salad under it, no lettuce, no tomato. The restaurant version arranged on leaves with olives and onion rings is a garnish habit rather than the dish.

The name is argued about. The obvious reading is tonnato from tonno, tuna. A competing account claims it comes from the French tanné, tanned, describing the colour, and that the tuna arrived later to explain a word nobody understood. The evidence for the second story is thin, and the first needs no explaining.

The wine is a white from the same region, an Arneis or a Gavi, and a light red works too because the sauce is richer than the meat.

What an Italian would say

That the veal cools in its own broth and that skipping this is why yours was dry. That the tuna goes in oil. And that a version bound with shop mayonnaise is perfectly nice and is not what their grandmother made.