We are on the cusp of salad season. I can feel it. We’re not quite there this week, although we were there last week, and I’m sure, before long, we will be there week after week. Blossom, daffodils, the first tulips, magnolias in bloom, the signs are all there. The thing is though, I don’t particularly love salad. My wife is a chlorophyll addict, bowls and bowls and bowls of watercress, sprocket get consumed I don’t know who exactly is responsible, perhaps the French I suspect, but someone, at some point, ruined the salad.
Below is a definition from a real-life dictionary of the word salad.
1: any of various (usually) cold dishes: such as
a) raw greens (such as lettuce) often combined with other vegetables and toppings and served especially with dressing, b) small pieces of food (such as pasta, meat, fruit, or vegetables) usually mixed with a dressing (such as mayonnaise) or set in gelatin
2: a green vegetable or herb grown for salad especially: LETTUCE
3: a usually incongruous mixture: HODGEPODGE
Using the definition above as a framework through which to view salad, we seem to have moved away from 1b towards 1a, and the focus now seems almost exclusively on 2 rather than 3.
As a kid in the 90s salad could be anything. Potatoes, sweetcorn, ham, tinned fruit, eggs, peas, chopped frankfurter, pear, cheese, nuts, raisins, bacon bits, breadcrumbs, chicken, fish fingers, carrot, pasta, pickles. Almost everything was fair game. This led to chaos in some quarters, pure genius in others. Cold food was a game of roulette, and I was front of the queue with a tasting spoon, desperate to unpick what was lurking amongst the mayonnaise dressing.
By the mid-2000s some strange sense of authenticity had crept into the production of salads, at home and out of doors. There’d always been lettuce fanciers, sure, tilling and fiddling on distant allotments, proffering slug riddled muddy green orbs; but they could be largely ignored in the 90s - we were too busy mixing ham, cheese, peas, chopped carrots and mayonnaise and calling it salad to worry about some chap with his trousers held up by bailing twine.
As I say, I don’t know how it happened, perhaps the allotment crew and the French formed an alliance and decided to infiltrate our homes via the medium of lettuce, but suddenly properly clever joyful salads dropped from the menu and all that remained were flaccid green leaves.
For disciples of the old wave of salading, there was one frontier that this new alliance couldn't reach, the last bastion of proper salading, a speakeasy for salading firebrands not willing to let go of everything they once knew just to see it all replaced by limp leaves and oily dressing: The Salad Bar.
We had two options where I grew up. There was the Harvester in Riverhead outside Sevenoaks, an institution labelled as ‘iconic’ by Kent Live, or there was the Pizza Hut on the Hill in Tunbridge Wells where the salad bar was part of a triple threat of anarchic inventions; the pizza buffet, the salad bar and the ice cream factory. I mean come on. For all the ingenuity and progress that has been made in restaurants and eating out in the intervening years, no one has topped that triumvirate for value, efficiency, delivery and sheer delight. It was an indication of the success of the salad bar of the early 90s that the pizza (or in Harvester's case the sticky ribs) was a distant second when it came to the motive for pushing for a visit to either establishment. And we saladed with gusto.
I remember when Pizza Piazza opened opposite Pizza Hut on the hill. It was the dawn of a sad day. From thenceforth, we kids had to fight tooth and nail for a trip to Pizza Hut, a new viable option was amongst us and it had caught our parent's eyes. It had pizza, sure, but beyond that it was dire. They had salads, of course, they did, but a) they decided what went in them, b) they were prepared for you and delivered already in bowls, and c) they were basically all lettuce with different dressings.
By the early 2000s, the glory years of salading were long gone. Instead, an era of quite insufferable salads - rocket, avocado and cheap balsamic vinegar - had been ushered in. Personally, I retired from the game for at least a decade. And then, a few things happened in quick succession. Panzanella at The River Cafe, Kohlrabi and brown shrimp at St John, and Chaat at the Dock Kitchen. These were grown-up salads that had been concocted with the same spirit that used to drive me onwards at the salad bar.
At a deep, primal sense I always knew that salad bar utopia couldn’t last. I made the most of it whilst I could. I appreciate also that the Salads below are grown up, properly constructed, fundamentally good for you, but I do think they have roots in the anti-establishment hodgepodge salad movement ushered in by the good pioneers of chaotic salad bars, and that’s enough for me. They’re delicious too, so there’s that. The salad bar is dead, long live the salad bar.
My favourite grown-up proper salads that aren’t just leaves:
Brown shrimp, kohlrabi, chervil - To my mind this is a St John classic, it is where I first ate it, and it is a perfect salad. To be honest, in recreating it at home, I find you can get pretty close to the restaurant version with cabbage (finely sliced and plunged into cold water for a few minutes to crisp up) and tarragon. I say this as kohlrabi and chervil can be quite hard to find. Apart from the addition of some lemon juice, salt and olive oil, the ingredients as exactly as stated above. I have included a recipe for my version below and I would hasten you to make this for yourself at home.
Panzanella - There is a very small window in the UK when this can and should be made, and in that window, I suggest making a Panzanella almost every day. Stale or toasted bread, doused in oil and vinegar, big ripe tomatoes chopped large and salted, perhaps a very finely sliced red onion, perhaps some basil if you have it, good oil, that is it. Serve it on its own, next to some simply grilled meat or fish, perhaps alongside a fresh cheese.
Chaat - this little savoury Indian snack/salad is the adult equivalent of a Tangfastic, in my opinion. The chaat masala (spice mix) is sharp and tangy, often from amchoor (dried mango powder) and when combined with something hot and fried (I like chickpeas or sometimes even little fried cauliflower pieces etc), some frazzled curry leaves, something fresh such as tomato or mango, and a squeeze of lemon juice or tamarind water, the sensation is all tingly joy in your mouth.
Fennel, orange, chipotle - I learned to make this from Stevie Parle when working at the Dock Kitchen. Finely sliced fennel, orange segments and juice, dried chipotle chillies fried briefly in oil, a pinch of salt; it is equal to and more than the sum of its parts. If you’re getting into something rich and fatty, this is the perfect salad to freshen and liven between mouthfuls.
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