I love stumbling upon excellent salads. Personally, I always prefer hot foods, even in warm weather (the European in me), but an excellent salad is enough to make me …
Neither too lean, nor too complicated; tasty but not drowning in dressing; balanced between ingredients. With just the right amount of protein added, whether meat, fish, nuts, dairy … they can be a feast unto themselves.
These type of salads are the ones I imagine I might eat if I ever get to live my new life in Italy. For example, I made a potato salad last night with egg and bacon and onion and capers, with a pretty amazing ranch-style dressing I’d never made before, to accompany some meats. There’s a nice bit left over. It was the type of salad, with heft to it, that would be fine completely by itself if I just wanted something light tonight to accompany a glass of … oh let’s say, pinot noir.
Speaking of which, what’s for dinner :)?
Poet Sydney Smith was great at appreciating a salad, especially one with egg and potato. And his dressing ingredients nearly 200 years ago were NOT DISSIMILAR to what I used last night (recipe coming!). Just goes to prove, we may be constantly evolving, but essentially, at heart, we remain the same x
Salad
To make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
And, lastly, o’er the flavored compound toss
A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
‘Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate can not harm me, I have dined to-day!
-Sydney Smith (1771-1845), Poem in the Public Domain
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