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Green Sauce
(Salsa verde) Chop all together some capers that have been in vinegar, one anchovy, a small slice of onion and just a taste of garlic. Crush the resulting hash with the blade of a knife to make it very fine. Add a sprig of parsley, chopped together with some leaves of basil and dissolve the whole in very good olive oil and lemon juice.
This sauce is excellent to season boiled chicken or cold boiled fish or hard boiled eggs.
Green Peppers can take the place of capers, if these are not at hand. 54
A hand-chopped uncooked sauce with no quantities at all, which is normal for Italian household writing of this period. The proportions below are a working starting point, not a correction.
- A workable set of quantitiesFor about half a cup of sauce: 2 tablespoons drained capers, 1 anchovy fillet, a thin slice of onion, a sliver of garlic no bigger than a pea, a good handful of parsley leaves, 6 basil leaves, then roughly 5 tablespoons olive oil and the juice of half a lemon. Add the oil gradually until the mixture just flows.
- Chop, do not puréeThe instruction to crush the mince with the flat of the knife is the point of the recipe: it breaks the capers and anchovy into a paste that binds with the oil while the herbs stay in visible flecks. A food processor turns the whole thing into a uniform green slurry and bruises the basil, which darkens it.
- The anchovy"One anchovy" most likely means one whole salted fish, which would be about two fillets from a modern tin. Salt-packed anchovies want rinsing and boning; oil-packed fillets can go straight in, with the oil counted toward the total.
- Capers in vinegarThe recipe assumes vinegar-pickled capers, which carry their own acidity. If yours are salt-packed, soak and rinse them and expect to want a little more lemon juice.
- "Green peppers" for capersThe substitute is probably a pickled green pepper rather than a raw bell pepper, since it is standing in for the caper's sharp, briny function. A raw sweet pepper would leave the sauce flat.
- Garlic and onion"Just a taste of garlic" is deliberate. Both alliums are raw and will keep getting stronger as the sauce sits, so err low and taste again after twenty minutes.
- Resting and holdingLet it stand 20 to 30 minutes before serving so the salt draws out and the flavors marry. It is best the day it is made; refrigerated overnight the basil blackens and the garlic dominates.
- Yield and servingThe quantities above dress boiled chicken or fish for four, or about six hard-boiled eggs. Serve it at room temperature — straight from the refrigerator the olive oil is cloudy and dull.
Salsa verde is the standard Italian answer to boiled meat and fish: a raw, sharp, herb-heavy emulsion of oil and acid whose job is to wake up something that has been simmered in water. Nearly every region has a version, most famously as an accompaniment to bollito misto in Piedmont and Lombardy, and the family resembles the older medieval green sauces of bread, vinegar and herbs found across Europe. It belongs to a period kitchen in which there was a great deal of boiled poultry — a bird poached for broth left the meat itself pale and mild, and the sauce was the meal's flavor. The capers-and-anchovy backbone is a widespread combination, and the casual note that green peppers will do if capers are lacking is a reminder that these books were written for cooks working from what the pantry held rather than from a shopping list.