The Art of the Salad

THE ART OF THE SALAD

Never am I more mortified than when I am served salad at the beginning of a meal. This is as foreign to me as wine for breakfast. Salad is a serious thing in my family, but never is it served before a meal. We are Italian, and our dressing of choice contains vinegar - for a reason.. Vinegar is a digestivo, and it helps to alleviate that certain discomfort in the stomach after one has gorged himself on three previous courses. It also cleanses the palette to make way for what’s next. If I am on a dinner date, and he orders a bowl of glum iceberg that he slathers in ranch or bleu cheese, the date is over right then and there.

Salads are built, not made. My mother’s refrigerator always swelled with at least three different lettuces, all dutifully washed by hand. Romaine, red and green leaf, butter lettuce, Boston lettuce, kale - all bursting with green nutrients - were ripped and shred to form the corpus of the creation, upon which the ingredients confined only by the contours of the creator’s imagination would be piled so high that my father would curse that the bowl was too full for him to dress and toss. Apples, nuts, pomegranate seeds, finook, anything with crunch, nestled in the leaves as surprises of flavor in each bite. No thoughtless bowl of bland and boring bowlmates, but a small symphony of color and crunch in your gastronomic journey.

We were salad snobs, for sure.. I could barely contain my contempt when my best friend’s mother served us our leafy denouement in Cool Whip bowls, paired mindlessly with store bought steakhouse dressing full of sugar and cheap vegetable oil. It was a culinary crime committed across the land, in kitchens and restaurants without care or thought and lacking all form and function, the American salad was a disgrace.

Then the Caesar salad arrived, via an Italian chef in Tijuana, Mexico, and the salad course was elevated. Coddled egg, anchovy, cheese, croutons - salad had arrived. No longer were they just a haphazard gathering of garden neighbors; no, they were now something to be designed because salad had culinary credibility as a stand-alone course. The Caesar was elegant but lacked pretension, and soon it appeared on dinner menus in American restaurants where it was swiftly mangled and reduced to a shadow of its Mexican self. Now, any bowl of leaf with croutons and creamy Caesar dressing masquerades as the real thing, and Americans are too illiterate to know the difference.

In my house, my father was the salad dresser. This was culinary law. He would rise from the table after his last bite, and take up the wooden utensils that were older than I. He never measured anything because he learned to cook from his mother whose answer to any question that began with “how much” was always “just enough, but not too much.” My father believed that Italian cuisine was not about thick sauces that required hours of cooking to amalgamate the flavors of the dish. That was how the French cooked. My father insisted that great Italian cooking was like a beauty contest where each ingredient was a standout and could be savored individually and no ingredient overpowered any other. Oversaucing one’s pasta was the gravest of sins because the nutty taste of the pasta was lost in its bath of sauce. Quality of ingredients is the base of Italian cuisine, and making them shine on their own is what Italian cooking is all about. So when he dressed the ensalada each evening, he drizzled only enough oil to achieve a sheen on each leaf and vinegar to taste. Never would there be a lagoon of dressing in the bottom of a salad bowl because that is a sign that you have smothered your precious ingredients and drowned out their flavor presence. Both my mother and my father are salad professionals - artists even - and the one thing you always have room for, is salad.