Insalata Mista means mixed salad.
If you want an italian style mixed salad, you don't make a dressing. You take your mixed greens, avoiding iceberg, which can't be found here, basing on romaine, or boston, or bibb lettuce, some radicchio, arugola if you bhave it, then generally the essential is carrots and tomato, often fennel and cucumbers. You can also add radishes, celery, onion, cuttinhg lettuces of different types, there are many available here you may not find.
Then you wash, drain well, and pour oil, vinegar, salt and if you like pepper (italians rarely like) and mix directly in the salad bowl, very very well.
the proverb is "be a spendthrift with the oil, a miser with the vinegar and mix and mix and mix". In fact, usually there is a little pool of oil at the bottom, which very improperly, most people surreptitiously sop up with their bread (there is no dipping oil here, it's considered irresistable but bad manners to dip the bread).
I don't have any absolute ideas about this, though this is the salad i really enjoy most, but if you want to call it "insalata mista" instead of mixed salad, you are implyinjg it is a traditional italian mixed salad, and then you avoid dressings, basil, herbs in general, mustard, sugar, cheeses, other stuff, and you dress it in the bowl directly from the oil and vinegar bottles
I have to say, also, that while extra virgin oil is always and has always been the standard, most italians always used regular wine vinegar until recent years when balsamic became popular here beyond the modena area, i might add, long after i started seeing it in the states! (Here means rome - not sure of other areas).
Last edited by siduri; 12-24-2008 at 05:56 AM.
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