Salads: things you should know

In the world I grew up in the major meal of the day was dinner (or supper, if you prefer). It was in the evening. This is how I continue: it’s in the evening. The time, however, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that at sometime in the day there is usually a meal that is considered the major one, often the social one with friends and/or family.

For me, this meal is incomplete without a salad. As tasty and satisfying as the meal may be, what I suppose you would call the entrée, it is bereft, lacking, unfulfilled if there is not a salad.

Here is a thing you should know about the salad – call it a cautionary note, a kind of consumer warning: A salad should have greenery. It may be romaine lettuce, it may be spinach, it may be any number of lettuces with their various names, but whatever it is it should be green.

Some “salads” engage in a bit of flim flam. A good example is the potato salad. They may taste fine, you may enjoy them immensely, but they are not salads. Often, as in the potato salad example, they are some kind of vegetable awash in mayonnaise.

It’s not a salad.

Coleslaw is even more devious in its bamboozling. It uses cabbage, which can often mask itself as a proper salad component, but is in fact a vegetable bred in the unholy waters of Perdition Bay. Coleslaw, like potato salad, attempts to mask its falsity in a bath of mayonnaise but – this cannot be stressed too strongly – it is not a salad!

Without a preponderance of green leafy bits, whatever you are eating is not a salad. And creamy guck on a “salad” should always be approached warily. It is almost always the death of salads.

Assuming a real salad (greenery), some people like to eat their salad prior to the meal. Some prefer it with the meal. And some prefer it after. It really doesn’t matter though it should be noted that many restaurants serve the salad first, a barbaric practice begun in kitchens that were too slow as a way of making diners think they had their food when they didn’t.

These days, I seem to be focused on fruity salads: sheaves of green stuff like spinach and/or lettuce sprinkled with raspberries, green apple chunks, clementine or mandarin slices, some onion, maybe some strawberry, or grape, or cucumber (onion and cucumber are not fruits, by the way) … and sprinkled with roasted almond slices and light dressing in parsimonious amounts.

That is a real salad. That is what a salad should be. When you look at a salad, the dominant colour should be green – not a creamy, gooey white with bits of stuff in it.

Of course, you can make any kind of salad you like. Another I enjoy is the Waldorf salad – however, I do not use cream guck but a vinaigrette made with walnut oil and apple cider vinegar, and used sparingly. It is green and unspoiled by mayonnaise goo. A delight.

I tell you all this because I do not want mayonnaise or other cream dressings on my salads. I do not want my salad served before the rest of my food (I usually eat it after eating everything else).

And I want a salad that is green, green, green!