four ingredients and no fifth: peppery rocket, shavings of aged parmesan, the best oil in the house, and lemon, dressed at the table and eaten within the minute
Origin: Italy
From the journey of Rocket.
This is the salad by which most of the world outside the Mediterranean first met rocket, and its austerity is deliberate rather than lazy. There is no vinegar, no mustard, no garlic, and no emulsified dressing: oil and lemon go on separately and are turned through the leaves by hand, in the Italian manner, so that nothing is ever whisked into anything. The result depends entirely on the quality of four things, which is why it appears on restaurant menus at prices that seem indefensible until the parmesan is tasted. The balance is more considered than it looks. Rocket brings heat and bitterness; parmesan brings salt, fat, and a crystalline sweetness from long ageing; lemon brings acid; oil carries all three and softens the leaf. Remove any one and the plate collapses. Add a fifth element and it becomes a different and generally worse salad, which is the usual fate of this dish in countries where it is served with balsamic glaze, pine nuts, and dried cranberries. Its closest ancestor is the humoral logic that Pliny set down and Evelyn repeated, in which a hot leaf is corrected by something cooling; here the correction is fat and acid rather than lettuce, but the instinct is identical. In Italy it is eaten after the main course rather than before it, as a palate-clearing contorno, and it is very often the thing ordered alongside a plate of fried food.
Everything depends on the four ingredients, so buy well and buy little. The parmesan should be a genuine long-aged Parmigiano Reggiano with visible crystalline specks; a young or generic hard cheese gives salt without sweetness and the salad tastes merely sharp. The oil should be one you would happily taste from a spoon. Wild rocket, with its narrow cut leaves, is hotter and stands up better to the cheese than the broad soft leaves of bagged garden rocket. Variations worth allowing: a few shavings of raw artichoke or fennel, or thin slices of pear, which is a northern Italian habit. Balsamic vinegar is not a variation but a different salad.
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