A Salad from the Garden: Insalata Pantesca

The Quiet Thread
Issue No. 03 — A Salad for Late Summer
Stories from our home at 682.5 metres above sea level

The Quiet Thread – Volume 3: A Salad for Late Summer

Every summer we seem to fall into a salad. One recipe takes hold of us, and then it becomes the salad of the season—appearing on our table almost daily until autumn arrives. And this way, we often remember the different years by the salad that carried us through.

Last year it was a mix of quinoa, nectarines, tomatoes, and basil, often with a little burrata on top. This year, we’ve found ourselves utterly devoted to Insalata Pantesca, a rustic dish from the tiny Italian island of Pantelleria, just off the coast of Sicily, best known for its salted capers. It’s a simple recipe, but one that feels just right for us—especially because it makes the most of what we already have in our own garden.

What goes into it

The salad begins with new potatoes. Here in Norway, the first tender potatoes arrive in June, and we think they are among the very best things you can eat. They are small — I’m showing them with my hands now, but of course no one can see — and we steam them whole, skins on, for about 20 minutes, until they are just tender. We never peel them. Personally, we like the skin, and besides, that’s where the vitamins live.

While the potatoes cook, we prepare two other important ingredients:

• The red onion, which we slice into rings and place in a bowl. We cover them with water and add a splash of balsamic vinegar — maybe two tablespoons, though we never measure. Letting the onion sit like this for a while takes away its sharpness and gives it a gentler flavour.

• The salted Italian capers, which need a good rinse and soak in fresh water to soften their intensity. These aren’t always easy to find, but if you can’t get them, the ones preserved in vinegar or olive oil will also work — and those don’t need to be rinsed at all. Still, for this recipe, the salted version really is the very best.

In the greenhouse we grow tomatoes—San Marzano, cherry, and a mix of small colourful varieties that look beautiful scattered across the salad. When you grow your own, you sometimes end up with very large ones if you don’t pick them on time, which makes the mix of sizes and colours even more fun on the plate.

Usually, our tomatoes are homegrown, but this year we’ve travelled so much that we haven’t been around to tend them properly. So some of our “short-travelled” tomatoes have had to come from the supermarket eight kilometres down the mountain. Still, the plants in the greenhouse are heavy with fruit now, and it looks like we’ll soon have more ripening at once. With a bit of luck, we’ll be eating this salad right through to October.

The basil grows there too. It thrives in the warmth, though it demands to be watered daily.

Bringing it together

When the potatoes are done, we pour cold water over them, cut them in half, and while they are still warm, put them straight into the bowl with tomatoes, capers, onions, and sliced olives. The potatoes need to be warm at this stage — that way they suck up the olive oil and flavours so much better than if they were cold.

Now, olives are a point of comedy in this house. Sometimes we use black ones, sometimes green ones, and then—because Arne doesn’t like routines—we go back to black again. Thank you very much.

We always use a very high-quality extra virgin olive oil for our salads, and here it’s no different. I used to have a rather heavy hand with the bottle—people told me so many times—and although olive oil is wonderful, these days we try to be a little more careful with the drizzle. You don’t need half the bottle for the salad to taste amazing—just a light hand lets the flavours shine through.

Then we add a little pepper, and mush everything gently together. A wooden spoon works, but honestly, your hands work just as well — and it’s a great way of getting all those flavours into the potatoes. Finally, we finish with a good handful of chopped basil on top.

Since the capers are already salty, we usually don’t add any extra salt at all — or only the smallest pinch.

A rustic feast

The result is a salad that is rustic and filling, yet bright and full of flavour. The potatoes give it heartiness, the basil adds freshness, and the capers make it sing.

And when the salad comes together, it’s truly a feast for the eyes: the golden yellows of the potatoes, the bright reds of the tomatoes (sometimes mixed with sunny yellows or the almost-black varieties we love), the green of the capers, the red onion sliced into delicate rings, and the generous basil on top. All together, it becomes a colourful, happy salad—just looking at it lifts your mood.

Although we usually enjoy it just as it is—perfect for a light lunch or sometimes a light dinner—this salad would also work beautifully with something from the grill, such as chicken.

For us, this is the taste of summer 2025. Simple ingredients, grown close to home, with just a small but essential treasure from Italy.

And of course, the question now is: what will next summer’s salad be? We usually stumble upon them by chance, and then fall into them completely. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see which ingredients destiny brings our way.

Ingredients (for two people, give or take)

This is a rustic salad, so we never bother with exact measurements — we just go about it in a “rustic” style and trust our eyes. Roughly, for two people:

• About 14 small new potatoes (seven each), steamed whole with skins on (never peeled — the skins are delicious, and full of vitamins)

• 2–3 large tomatoes, sliced, and a handful of smaller ones cut in half — but really, every time is different, depending on what we have available

• A generous handful of salted capers (the more the better)

• A few olives, black or green (depending on Arne’s mood)

• Some red onion, sliced into rings and softened for 20 minutes in water and balsamic vinegar

• Plenty of fresh basil

• A drizzle of good extra virgin olive oil

• A little pepper

• (Optional: the tiniest pinch of salt — only if you must, because the capers already bring plenty)