It’s spring. Therefore it must be time for a simple green salad. The end of roots and brassicas is heralded by this focus on green leaves and more. Think green peas and broad beans. Think new-season artichokes, and think dressings. In its simplest form oil and vinegar, but mustard helps to emulsify, and adds flavour, a way to ring the changes. Delicious? Sometimes, but often not. A salad is so much a matter of balance and this is not easy.
I used to teach cookery courses in Italy and as each day unfolded in a series of endlessly languid delicious meals cooked by the students the question asked more than any other was my dressing. How to get that balance, how to mix it. How, in short, to make it so easily and so deliciously, every time.
Elizabeth David wrote extensively about salads. How to ensure the acid element was not too powerful, how to dress using just vinegar and oil, but in the days when olive oil was far from easy to get, or as potentially delicious.
Whatever about the dressing, what about the leaves? A balance of sweet and savoury, small and large; little gem with chicory, rocket with lamb’s lettuce, purslane with mizuna. And what if you broaden the net and build your salad into something more chopped, or a la Lyonnaise, or as the French would have it, composed. What is to go in and stay out, how and what to dress with? And what if you want to use herb? They can lift or kill, a stalker in the wings.
Any assessment of a chef can be done on two dishes, a soup and a salad. I’m often asked, what soup, what salad? They want a steer, but there is none. In those two dishes and the salad particularly, you get everything; the ability to match ingredients, the approach to seasonality, a test of dressing and seasoning, balance, ying and yang. A salad should be simple but so too should it be delicious and the two do not follow automatically.
So what does this mean for me?: Think about salads as a whole world of possibility
Tell me what I should do: Make up one new salad each week, something that you haven’t done before.
