Veal in Tuna Sauce

History

Vitello tonnato — cold sliced veal served under a tuna-based sauce — is documented as a dish of Piedmont in northern Italy, with its origins commonly traced to the eighteenth century. In its early life it was a thrifty preparation that made use of leftover boiled meat. Although Piedmont is landlocked, it drew on long-standing trade with the neighbouring Ligurian coast, from which preserved tuna, olive oil, lemons and capers reached its kitchens. The dish spread through the north and beyond, and neighbouring regions such as Lombardy and Veneto also lay claim to it; Italian emigrants later carried it to the Río de la Plata, where "vitel toné" became a Christmas fixture in Argentina and Uruguay. Pellegrino Artusi's 1891 codification is the version recorded here: the veal is simmered with aromatics, sliced thin, and steeped a day or two in a sauce of pounded tuna, anchovies, capers, abundant olive oil and lemon juice. Notably it carries no mayonnaise — the creamy, mayonnaise-enriched sauce familiar today is a later, twentieth-century development in which mayonnaise gradually displaced the older oil-and-egg dressing.

Ingredients

• kg milk-fed veal, leg or rump, boneless
• anchovies
• onion
• bay leaf
• celery, carrot, parsley
• g tuna in oil
• anchovies (for sauce)
• fine olive oil
• juice of lemon
• capers
• lemon wedges

Instructions

1. Trim a 1 kg boneless piece of milk-fed veal and lard it with anchovy pieces.
2. Tie loosely and boil 1.5 hours in salted water with clove-studded onion, bay, celery, carrot and parsley; add the meat once boiling.
3. Cool, slice thin, and steep the slices a day or two in the sauce.
4. For the sauce, pound or sieve tuna and anchovies, adding fine oil little by little and lemon juice to keep it runny; stir in capers.
5. Serve the veal with its sauce and lemon wedges; save the strained broth for risotto.