As 2021 begins, the dish I find myself craving the most, slightly to my surprise, is salad. The version I’ve been making most often lately is a concoction of raw Brussels sprouts, shredded finely and mixed with a Vietnamese-inspired dressing of garlic, mint leaves, chillies, fish sauce, rice vinegar, lime juice and cashew nuts. I don’t eat this salad because it is healthy—though it undoubtedly is—but because it wakes up my taste buds quicker than a double espresso. With its brightness and crunch, it tastes as close as I can get to a fresh start.
The rules of salad have changed. To be a salad eater is no longer an act of dieting or denial. Now you can eat salad because you want to eat it. The word no longer needs to bring to mind a flavorless bowl of cold tomatoes and watery lettuce. Rather, it could be any combination of crisp and sharp ingredients that you happen to find in your refrigerator and feel like having with dinner. A carefully made salad, as food writer Nigella Lawson writes in her new cookbook “Cook, Eat, Repeat,” will lift the spirits and “add poetry to the prose of everyday life.”
Growing up in Britain, as Ms. Lawson also did, I often looked to the U.S. for salads that were fuller and more generous than ours, which might consist of a couple of disks of undressed cucumber with some raw onion and vinegary beetroot. I dreamed of America’s Caesar and Cobb salads, with their flavorful dressings and lavish scatterings of croutons.
There have been many ages of salad at the American table. Perhaps no other dish has undergone so many transformations over the decades. Salads hold up a mirror to the changing culinary obsessions of the times, from the curious gelatin-based concoctions of the 1940s to the baked goat cheese and frisée salads of the 1980s to the raw kale of the 2010s. When salade Niçoise became fashionable in the 1960s, it reflected the new popularity of foreign travel to Europe. This mixture of tuna and black olives and green beans seemed deeply sophisticated compared with the old deli staple of tuna salad made with mayonnaise and chopped celery.
“ Salad-making today feels so much more driven by passion than in the past, helped by the glorious selections of leaves at greenmarkets. ”
It can be hard to remember how the vast choice of salad stuff now compares with a few decades ago. Take radicchio. These bitter purple-and-white leaves were almost unheard of among American cooks until the mid-1970s, when in the space of six months it seemed that every expensive restaurant in New York added radicchio to its menu, starting with Le Cirque.
Arugula had a similarly stratospheric rise in the 1970s. When this spicily pungent leaf first became popular, food writers could not agree what to call it, as David Kamp recounts in his 2006 book “The United States of Arugula.” Some called it roquette and others rucola or rugola before arugula finally became the accepted word in the U.S. (In the U.K. we call it “rocket.”)
Salad eaters are capricious beings. Certain salad ingredients that were once ubiquitous—such as the raspberry vinegar and wild rice of the 1980s—have now almost vanished. Others, such as iceberg lettuce, rose, then fell, then rose again. As long ago as the 1940s, some recipe columns were complaining that iceberg was tasteless compared with romaine. By the 1980s, in “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” chefs Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins commented that iceberg should only ever be used “as a last resort.” And yet now, against the odds, the iceberg “wedge” salad has been resurrected, as a backdrop to rich and retro dressings such as Green Goddess. What the iceberg lacks in flavor, it makes up for in its satisfying crunch.
Salad-making today feels so much more driven by passion than in the past, helped by the glorious selections of leaves at greenmarkets, from purslane to pea shoots. Gone are the days described by Laurie Colwin in her 1988 book “Home Cooking” when salads were cobbled together by people who seemed to hate eating them. Ms. Colwin recalled being served salads in “a small, fake wooden bowl containing the chopped carcasses of what were once edible plants, usually the unfairly treated romaine, with some depressed red cabbage that has turned blue, dribbled with lurid orange-colored dressing.”
Part of what distinguishes the salads of today from those of the past is that vegetables that used to be raw may now be roasted or grilled (radishes, lettuces) while vegetables that are traditionally cooked may be served raw (kale, beets, Brussels sprouts). The prime example of this is the kale salad invented by brilliant salad chef Joshua McFadden at Franny’s restaurant in Brooklyn in 2007. Mr. McFadden invented the kale salad because he was bored with the selection of salad greens available over the winter.
Mr. McFadden’s 2017 cookbook “Six Seasons” is one of the first I turn to for salad ideas because he has such a keen sense of salad as something joyful. I particularly like his recipe for carrots cooked in oil and water made into a salad with dates, olives, crème fraîche and delicious cheese crisps called frico. This is a salad you make not to lose weight but to extract as much pleasure as possible from a carrot.
The new excitement about salads is perfectly captured by a delightful newsletter created by food writer Emily Nunn called “The Department of Salad.” Every issue, the newsletter runs thoughtful interviews with fellow salad enthusiasts and celebrates a different aspect of American salads, from Caesar (“Never ever, ever use mayo”) to blue cheese dressing and how “it never seems to be as good as what you recall having had that time at that place you once went.”
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But above all, “The Department of Salad” is about redefining salad as comfort food, whether it’s a classic Greek salad or a modern panzanella of roasted fall vegetables. Ms. Nunn decided to start making salads for herself as a consolation for the drab loneliness of the pandemic. The quality of the berries and tomatoes and other produce she could buy near her home in North Carolina was so “luxurious and inexpensive and glorious” that her salads turned out “dazzling and delicious, like bouquets of flowers that you could eat.”
This is the best reason that I have yet heard to eat more salad. We could all do with some edible bouquets in our lives right now.
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Appeared in the January 2, 2021, print edition.
January 02, 2021 at 04:57AM
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The Great American Salad Revolution - The Wall Street Journal
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