Start with the parsley. It should smell like a garden, not like a refrigerator. Look for bunches with stems that snap rather than bend, leaves that are deeply green and unwilted. This is the heart of salsa verde, and everything depends on its aliveness.

In Italy, this sauce appears on tables from Piedmont to Lombardy, always a little different, always built on the same principle: bright herbs, briny capers, the quiet depth of anchovy, and enough good oil to bring it together. It is the sauce you make when you have grilled something beautiful and want to honor it without fuss.

The technique is almost nothing. Chop. Stir. Taste. The work is in the shopping: finding parsley that was cut this morning, capers packed in salt rather than brine, anchovies that smell of the sea rather than tin. When these things are right, the sauce makes itself.

Every meal is a meaningful choice. This one asks you to care about a bunch of parsley, and that caring ripples outward to the farmer who grew it, the soil that fed it, the whole quiet network that puts real food on your table.