Big, Easygoing Salads Full of Delicious Prizes

From a prize of a new cookbook, Around Our Table, by Sara Forte

Sara Forte’s Sesame Cucumber Crunch, from her new book, Around Our Table

THE YEAR WE STARTED OUT at the Department of Salad, getting up and running felt a bit like going on walkabout. We wandered around happily but aimlessly, exploring any salady thing that captured our attention. We spent days wondering “what else can be pickled? And hours noticing that a lot of dips seemed suspiciously like condensed versions of our favorite salad dressings. And weeks just reading vintage salad recipes; basically anything orbiting the salad universe captivated us.

We’re still completely captivated, so we never stopped doing these sorts of things—all in the name of bringing you good salad. It’s how we noticed a ridiculous need in this world to construct salad categories, which to us reflects mankind’s inscrutable, diabolical desire to reign in the magic of salad. This is from a recent Google search:

Who is asking such absurd questions? And to what end? This push to classify something as freewheeling as salad—to PowerPoint it, Excel spreadsheet it, Basecamp it—reminds me of a line from ee cummings: given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss.

The instinct to pigeonhole salad is a topic that I touched on a bit recently in a piece I wrote for the June issue of the UK’s Waitrose Food Magazine, which you can download here if you’d like to read my piece. (It’s on page 52, but the whole magazine is always terrific).