Salsa Tonnata alla Piemontese

Salsa tonnata is proof that canned fish can achieve elegance. In Piedmont, during the sweltering summers when no one wants to stand over a hot stove, cooks have long relied on this cool, silken sauce. It drapes over thin slices of poached veal in the famous vitello tonnato, but it has other lives too: as a dip for raw vegetables, spread on crostini, or spooned over hard-boiled eggs.

The sauce depends on quality tuna packed in olive oil. Not water. Never water. That pale, flaky tuna packed in brine has no place here. You want the dense, meaty tuna from Italy or Spain, packed in good olive oil that becomes part of the sauce itself. The anchovies add depth without fishiness. The capers provide salt and bright punctuation. The egg yolks bind everything into something rich and spoonable.

This is not mayonnaise, though lazy cooks sometimes reach for that shortcut. Traditional tonnata achieves its creaminess through emulsification: egg yolks and olive oil, bound slowly, with the tuna providing body. The result is lighter than mayonnaise, more complex, and unmistakably Italian.