OLD SAUCE, NEW TRICKS.

Tuna sauce (tonnato) can take you places you never dreamed of.

Sometimes we can cook the same thing time and again, then suddenly just serve it with something else, and it’s different. Gloriously so.

Take Italy’s tonnato sauce, a velvety tuna cream that is traditionally poured over finely sliced, lightly poached veal. But tonnato sauce is so brilliant in its own right that you could hoover it up by the spoonful. It isn’t there to make the best of something else. It IS something else; briny, sea-salty, silky and remarkably, not fishy.

Sure, use it as a coating sauce – just drizzle it in stripes from the end of a tablespoon, or plaster it over the top like, well, plaster. But consider spooning the sauce onto the serving plate first, then adding your grilled vegetables, or tomatoes, or whatever-it-is on top. Like hard-boiled eggs.

Further thoughts (you knew I would have some):

Strew with sugar snaps and snow peas and green beans and peas.

Or do what they do at Bar Louise in Sydney’s Enmore Road, and serve a ‘tomato tonnato’ by putting a wondrous smoked anchovy mayonnaise on the base of the plate, then topping it with juicy discs of ripe tomato and scattering the top with pickled guindilla chillies, fried capers and grated tuna bottarga. Oh yeah. Here it is, pinched from their socials.

Or stay with the idea of the poached veal, but swap it for rare roast beef. And if you’re suffering from too much cognitive dissonance (perception of contradictory information and its mental toll) at the idea of surf and turf, then let me make it worse by saying tonnato is also fabulous with cold roast chicken, turkey and pork.

• Can you imagine tossing still-warm peeled and cooked potatoes in this stuff with a few extra capers and some dill, and letting it cool for a potato salad? Oofah.

I’m also thinking it would be a knock-out to use as a Caesar salad dressing, lightened with a little red wine vinegar.

• Fill celery stalks with tonnato, garnish with capers, refrigerate and serve cold. Retro fabulosity.

Use a tonnato sauce for devilled eggs. Or any hard-boiled egg. Or any eggs at all.

Or do what Terry did to the tonnato and eggs and tomato in the pics here, and shovel the left-overs into a baguette, for a great office lunch that channels both Nicoise pan bagnat and Tunisian casse-croute. Split a small sourdough baguette along the top, without cutting through. Spoon on tonnato sauce, add a jumble of chopped hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumber, capers, and red onion, bit more sauce, bit more salad. Eat immediately because you can’t wait, or roll tightly in plastic and leave until lunchtime – it will look messier, but taste amazing because it will all soak in.

• Or do a simple version of the tomato tonnato with autumn’s lovely late harvest.

TONNATO (TUNA AND ANCHOVY SAUCE)

• 150g to 180g tuna in good oil

• 3 anchovy fillets

• 1 tbsp salted capers, rinsed and drained

• 1 tbsp lemon juice

• 2 tsp Dijon mustard

• 150g whole egg mayonnaise (6 tbsp)

Drain the oil from the tuna but reserve it; you may like to add a little of it back in if the sauce is too thick.

Place the tuna, anchovies, capers, lemon juice, Dijon and mayonnaise in a food processor and whiz to a puree.

Taste for lemon juice and saltiness; it should pack a punch. Don’t be shy now.

Add a tablespoonful of the reserved tuna oil – or just of water, or white wine - and whiz again until it’s very smooth and velvety, even a little fluffy. You want a thick pouring consistency, not too runny.

Refrigerate until required.

At its simplest, scatter your tonnato with extra capers, picked parsley leaves and tiny little segments of lemon flesh, nicked out of a couple of lemon slices.

But it goes REALLY WELL with hard-boiled eggs, capers, celery leaves, finely sliced celery for crunch, with a couple of jalapeno chillies for a random what-the-hell-was-that vibe and a dusting of paprika.

To hard-boil eggs the best way ever – place in a pan of boiling water and simmer for 10 minutes (for 60g eggs). Drain and drop the eggs into a bowl of cold water, cracking the shells, then peel them under the water. Use an egg slicer for the most deeply pleasing outcome.

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Thanks for dropping by! And as always, thanks for your comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Terry for the baguette hack, and the office lunch.

I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands and waters upon which I work, live, cook and play; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to the continuing strength and resilience of First Nations people, communities and cultures.