Side Dish or Salad: Let's Blur the Boundaries

My silky leeks on tonnato verde is one good way to do it. 🐠 🌿 Plus, we have a simple bitter greens salad with pears, burrata, and crushed grape balsamic vinaigrette. 🍇

Silky Leeks with Tonnato Verde

I DON’T WANT TO START A FIGHT, but I’ve decided to incorporate the world’s many, many side dishes into the empire of salad. And I’d like to see someone try and stop me.

It’s not my desire to annex the entire Western menu. I won’t be taking control of the entrees or desserts (although, we have featured my cousin Susan’s absolutely perfect chocolate peanut butter sheet cake; downloadable recipe below). And side dishes should thank rather than fear me, because I’m doing it for their own good—and, yes, for the good of salad, which is itself often considered a side dish.

Susan's Chocolate Peanut Butter Sheet Cake

1.26MB ∙ PDF file

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“Side dish" just sounds so demeaning, like a mistress or an understudy. And I believe it’s meant to. Restaurants everywhere seem to be telling diners, Oh, sure, have the inconsequential seared mushrooms or the desperate creamed spinach or the garlicky broccoli rabe. But the star of this show is our giant bone-in slab of meat/3-pound lobster/roast chicken.

Anyway, we live in a free country, so here I go: Most non-entree and non-dessert dishes—starters, sides, appetizers, contorni, mezze, antipasto, tapas, hors d’oeuvres, canapés, crudites, plats d'accompagnement—are now salads in the eyes of the Department of Salad. We hope you’ll come over to our side, as we liberate both salads and sides from the perverse bonds of compartmentalization and categorization.

Spread a thick layer of tonnato verde on your serving plate, then decorate it with the silky leeks.