A World of Salad

Salad used to mean one of three things to me:  Leafy greens with assorted raw vegetables (the classic green or garden salad), shredded cabbage and carrot in a mayonnaise style dressing (coleslaw) or potato salad featuring chopped hard-cooked eggs - preferably decoratively lying on a large lettuce leaf, and dusted with paprika.  When I was very young, the green salads arrived at the table pre-dressed with Miracle Whip salad dressing, which seems strange to me, now.  It wasn't long before that particular style gave way to vinaigrettes, and at the tender age of twelve or so, I refused to have anything on my salads other than red wine vinegar, straight up, and continued on that path until I discovered blue cheese dressing.

While there was some inherent variety in the green salad, by virtue of which fresh vegetable toppings were available, the standards were usually tomato, cucumber and radishes, with occasional bell peppers and fresh sliced mushrooms.  I've spoken of my mother's green salads before, enormous, sprawling things, they were really the only salad of the three that brooked any sort of variation. Coleslaw and potato salads remind inviolate in their construction, dependable and almost stoic in their consistency.  Salad was a side dish that had to meet certain requirements of rounding out a meal quietly without ever being the star of the show.  Salads were a vegetable delivery mechanism, and a pleasant change of texture from whatever else was on the plate.  Salad was never, ever, dinner unto itself.

The notion of a woman only eating salad on a date depressed me beyond belief, both for the notion that this somehow constituted desirable behaviour and for the dreary expectation of endless, bland offerings of tired lettuce and token, under ripe tomatoes.  I was perhaps saved from the ghastliness of attempting to actually put that in to practice, by both a decided lack of dating and by the infuriating chauvinism of George Gordon, Lord Byron, who wrote "A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands." The sheer fury I experienced at first reading that phrase engendered the absolute opposite effect, as I vowed that I would never be one of those ridiculous women who ordered food based on what she thought she was expected to eat.  Even more certainly, I declared to myself that I would never, ever order salad on a date.  Certainly, any salad scrumptious enough to make me change my mind ought to be sinful enough to qualify for exemption from the rule.  As it turns out, though, I almost never order a salad even when I'm not on a date; if I do, it had better be full of shrimp, or chicken, or pears and blue cheese. 

There were certain other things that had the world "salad" in the name, but certainly didn't meet the requirements as a side dish.  Chicken salad and egg salad, whichever came first, were sandwich fillings, and I had always thought that the name salad was inappropriate, here.  This is in part because I was unfamiliar with the idea of a chopped salad, particularly the Russian variety, which features a combination of raw and cooked ingredients chopped very small and bound with a dressing into a spoonable mass.  There were salads that I heard of, and sometimes tasted at other people's houses - distressing mixtures of undrained canned beans with sugar added to them, and rice salads that used the wrong type of rice - long grain, which develops an unpleasant hardness when chilled.

As a teen, I discovered pasta salads, and had a few attempts at them, but I always found them under seasoned and gloppy with dressing when I made them at home, and didn't usually bother.  Indeed, it took some time for me to warm up to them entirely, although I do enjoy them now.  Of course, now I am likely to spike the dressing with Thai red curry, or dress the pasta with a lemon and olive oil vinaigrette and adorn it with the components of a classic Greek salad, but these things were unknown to me in my earliest experimental years.

It took some time before I warmed up to the idea of salad as something other than a vegetable delivery mechanism in the form of a side dish.  I was always happy to eat a nicely constructed salad as part of a meal, but I never really got all that excited about them.  In fact, the first time that I can remember actively craving salad was in February, 1987, when I had just returned to the Sunshine Coast after two weeks above the Arctic Circle. Vegetables were astronomically expensive in any form, there, and fresh ones simply were not available at all during a time when there was barely more than three hours of daylight in a 24 hour period.  My last dinner in Inuvik was crowned with a special treat - frozen strawberries that had been defrosted in my honour, and suspended in Jell-O.  This may, in fact, be the genesis of my absolute horror of gelled desserts.  I arrived home simply dying for something fresh, raw, and crunchy, to my family's bemusement. 

When I started eating in restaurants, very quickly it seemed to me that most of the salads I encountered were sad renditions indeed, often barely acting as more than a garnish on a plate.  Even the Chef's Salad in so many moderate eateries seemed to simply be the usual sad green salad with a handful of cheese and cold cuts tossed on top.  There was simply no way this was going to cut it as a meal.  It lacked the depth of flavour and the substance required to make one feel as though one has eaten a whole meal.  Cobb salads featured a little better, featuring egg, avocado, Roquefort, and sometimes, if you're lucky, baby corn and mushrooms.

Early-nineties grilled chicken breast on overdressed, indifferent Caesar salad, the bland layered on the bland, did not inspire me to consider salad a meal, either.  In fact, it was my forays into the cuisines of cultures much further away, that sparked my interest.  If lentils were served hot, they functioned as a starch (and perhaps a protein) but cold, dressed with sharp acids and finely minced vegetables, they were definitely a salad.  Not only that, but a salad so full of flavour that I was hard pressed to want anything else!  Cold noodles - previously palatable primarily by re-heating, underwent a different treatment in Japan - slippery and delicious, slick with sesame oil and studded with green onions and bits of chile.  India boasts a number of exciting salads, some of which vary from their chutneys only in volume of serving, and many of which assembled together can make up a fabulous meal on their own.

Europe, whose culinary charms I was temporarily blinded to in my passion for food farther from my cultural roots, produces the French classic Salad Nicoise - a meal in itself if ever there was one.  Italy, with its salad-like antipasto plates featuring such delicacies as marinated artichokes wrapped in luscious strips of prosciutto, has a salad called panzanella - made from leftover bread - that actually inspire cravings in Italians far from home.  The Scandinavians excel in the salad department, too.  Pickled salads made from vegetables, meat, or fish, fresh salads when the season allows, and a true celebration of the "cold table" where rest such chilled offerings as composed salads.

Freshness of ingredients is something that one hears chefs harping on quite often, and nowhere is it as immediately evident as in the salad.  A wilt in the greens, a lack of ripeness in a tomato, an unwashed bean or lentil - these things are deleterious to both appetite, texture, and flavour.  Salad encompasses mighty big territory, though, and it would be a shame to consign one's mental picture of salad eternally to a few sad strips of lettuce.  One of the dictionary definitions of salad is "a varied mixture."  If you're tired of iceberg doused in ranch, it's time to vary your mixture.

July 2005