Salads

Appears in

Published 1999

About

I once wrote a whole book on salads. I worked on it for several months and it was not until the depths of a cold winter that my family protested that they were rather tired of eating salads every day. And a fridgeful of limp, half-eaten salads became a bit depressing. So then I devised some more substantial salads using cooked or semicooked vegetables, and their interest revived. As in almost all dishes, the contrast of textures in a salad is one of the keys to its appeal. By using cooked vegetables too, you can exploit those mellow flavours which are absent before heat brings them out. Another effect which works well is to mix hot or warm ingredients with cold. Salads are aesthetically pleasing and of great nutritional value. On a hot summer’s day, I enjoy few meals more than a collection of different salads, carefully balanced. Several of the salads in this chapter can be combined to make a summer meal, or alternatively are ideal To Serve as a starter for a more formal occasion. Some will make a light meal on their own, perfect for a quick lunch with a friend. One of the best things about salads is that you can actually feel that they are good for you; they have a refreshing effect on the stomach and hardly ever make you too full or sleepy. When my daughter lived in Russia for a year, she sometimes had nothing fresh and green to eat for weeks. We are very lucky indeed to have such a wealth of ingredients easily available, which enable us to create salads for all seasons that are endlessly interesting.

'Brilliant app for foodies'

'Spotify of cookbooks'