Home › Sauces and Meats › Veal with Tunny
Veal with Tunny
(Vitello tonnato) Take two pounds of meat without bones, remove the fat and tendons, then lard it with two anchovies. These must be washed and boned and cut lengthwise, after opening them, making in all eight pieces. Tie the piece of meat not very tight and boil it for an hour and a half in enough water to cover it completely. Previously put into the water one quarter of an onion larded with clover, one leaf of laurel, celery, carrot and parsley. Salt the water generously and don't put the veal in until it is boiling. When the veal is cooked, untie, dry it and keep it for two or three days in the following sauce in quantity sufficient to cover it.
Grind 1/4 pound tunny fish preserved in olive oil and two anchovies, crush them well with the blade of a knife and rub through a sieve adding good olive oil in abundance little by little, and squeeze in one whole lemon, so that the sauce should remain liquid. Finally mix in some capers soaked in vinegar. Serve the veal cold, in thin slices, with the sauce.
The stock of the veal can be rubbed through a sieve and used for risotto. 91
A Piedmontese cold dish that depends almost entirely on two things: not letting the veal boil hard, and giving the sauce enough time on the meat. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: keep the water at a bare simmerA rolling boil for ninety minutes will squeeze a two-pound piece of veal dry and stringy. Bring the aromatic water to a boil, add the meat as directed, then drop the heat so the surface barely trembles; 1 to 1 1/4 hours is usually enough for a tied piece of top round, and an instant-read thermometer should show about 150F at the centre.
- "Clover" is clovesA typesetting slip. The quarter onion is studded with two or three whole cloves. "Laurel" is bay.
- The cut"Two pounds of meat without bones" means a solid lean piece — eye of round (Italian girello or magatello) or a comparable lean roast such as top round. Ask for it in one piece and tie it loosely so it holds its shape but the anchovy larding is not squeezed out.
- Larding with anchovySalt-packed anchovies rinsed, boned and split lengthwise give eight strips. Push them into slits cut with a thin knife along the grain. Oil-packed fillets work and need no rinsing, though they are softer to handle.
- TunnyTuna, and specifically tuna preserved in olive oil, as the recipe says. Water-packed tuna will not emulsify with the oil and lemon in the same way. A quarter pound is 4 oz.
- The saucePounding, sieving and then beating in oil little by little is a hand-made mayonnaise technique without egg; a food processor does it in under a minute. It should pour, not mound — thin with more lemon juice or a spoonful of the veal stock if it stiffens. Fold the capers in at the end so they stay whole.
- The two or three daysThis resting is what makes the dish, but it belongs in the refrigerator, not a cool larder. Slice the meat thin only after it has chilled firm; cold veal cuts far more cleanly than warm.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of veal, sliced thin, serves six to eight as an antipasto or a summer main course with the sauce spooned over. Serve it cool but not fridge-cold.
- The stockWorth saving as the recipe suggests. Strain it, chill, lift off the fat, and it is a light broth for risotto or for loosening the sauce.
Vitello tonnato is Piedmontese, and the pairing of veal with preserved tuna and anchovy makes sense for an inland region that got its sea fish in salt and oil rather than fresh — cured fish worked as a seasoning the way anchovy did across northern Italy. Pellegrino Artusi gave a version in La scienza in cucina, a book that first appeared in 1891 and grew edition by edition, so it is not certain when the recipe entered it; Maria Gentile's Italian Cook Book of 1919, which draws heavily on that tradition for an American readership, follows the same method: poach, cool, steep in the fish sauce for several days. The name is often traced to the French tanné, "tanned," describing the colour the sauce takes rather than any tuna at all, though this is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one. The egg-thickened mayonnaise version most restaurants now serve is a later simplification; the older sieved sauce here, bound only by oil and pounded fish, is closer to the original.