silverguide.site –
There’s no time quite like the summer – a season that begs to be enjoyed with a Zen-like presence of mind – to get into all the things you don’t like about yourself. It comes out with the sun; a personal cumulus of worries about things like haircuts or the fact that, once again, you don’t have a wearable summer shoe. This is usually the time when I try to rebrand as a “salad person”. This isn’t a health thing, to be clear, it’s more a matter of Fomo. It happens when, on those lucid summer afternoons, I see greengrocers’ stalls with unusually weighty tomatoes. I hear talk of things like panzanella. There are people eating an immaculately composed Waldorf salad not as a preface to real food, but as a meal in itself. This is when I start trying to improve myself.
I am not predisposed to be a salad person. My cooking instincts lead me to stews and braises and soups – things that meld and mutate, things that actually cook. I could probably go years without it ever occurring to me to make a salad for dinner, but in my defence, I come from a line of non-salad people. Sometimes, my family would put a bowl of iceberg lettuce on the table, but their heart was never really in it; I don’t think it even occurred to anyone to dress it.
When my parents did make a real salad, they came unmoored. There was a Nigel Slater one they sometimes prepared, not even a named recipe but a serving suggestion smuggled into the method section of a salad dressing. He recommended beansprouts, slices of red pepper and ripe banana, tossed in some kind of sesame oil lotion. I am not saying that it was necessarily bad, but all the same this was a salad as conceived by Dr Seuss. Other times, my dad went on a back-to-my-roots kick and we had Ghanaian salad which, for the uninitiated, involves lettuce, tomato, cucumber (so far, so normal), then hard-boiled egg (makes sense), tinned sardines (janky Niçoise, but fine) and baked beans (unconscionable).
I had my first truly great salad at university. It was made by my friend Tessa, who is Swiss; a detail I share only to say that she has that light-touch, granola-and-a-hike healthfulness I can only dream of. From her Ottolenghi cookbook she made a salad with baby spinach leaves, ragged pitta pieces toasted in butter until crisp, chopped medjool dates and sumac. I think of this salad often – seldom with any follow-through but with genuine fondness. I did make it recently, though, and it was exactly what I had hoped for. Why don’t I do this more?
I have sought guidance in this quest. At first I looked on Instagram, but people over there are calling vegetables “veggies”. What’s more, I do not believe a salad recipe video should have a commentary that mentions – even in passing – pimples, lymphatic drainage or gut health. I do not understand how we have normalised this. So I have returned to the old ways – to cookbooks – in search of words that inspire.
For all the visual splendour of a well-made salad, there is something right about a salad painted with words. A salad, like a sentence, is a composition of artfully chosen nouns. Take John Evelyn’s recipe, hundreds of years old. “Parsley, sage, garlic, chives, onions, leek, borage, mint, scallion, fennel and nasturtium, rue, rosemary, purslane” – it reads so well. A gado-gado of tofu, egg, satay sauce, green beans and new potatoes. The eclectic geometry of feta cubes, cucumber, tomato and hoops of red onion. A tumbledown fruit salad of wild strawberries and mint. There’s an essay by the food writer John Birdsall – he talks about “drifts of leaves and flowers, sprigs of herbs and tiny carrots that looked like they had been blown there by some mighty force of nature.” Some of these things test the definition of a salad, others have the elegance of a haiku. I crave the former. A salad of pure, crisp green will never quite suit me.
I was recently reminded of something Laurie Colwin wrote in Home Cooking: “Chicken salad has a certain glamour about it. Like the little black dress, it is chic and adaptable and can be taken anywhere.” Inspired, I made a rambunctious Nigel Slater salad – watercress with leftover roast chicken, orange, soy-toasted pumpkin seeds and almonds. I loved it, although I did wonder what it would be like with those toasted pitta chips. If there is a sartorial analogy to be drawn, it’s only this: you cannot hit summer and suddenly become a “troughful of veggies” person any more than you can suddenly pivot to Y2K low-rise jeans. I’m trying, this year, to salad not for the person I want to be, but for the person I am. I think it suits me pretty well.
Comment