The super-luscious Vegan Kale Caesar with Crispy Chickpeas, from “What Goes with What,” by Julia Turshen
EARLIER THIS MONTH, the Department of Salad hit its 4th anniversary. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long since salad became the hottest dish in the universe.
Oh, wait, that’s corndogs.
Nonetheless, the boys in the lab and I still get a little misty when we look back to the time, at the height of the Pandemic, when we dug deep into our souls, reassessed our dreams and goals, and decided to dedicate our remaining years on this planet to salad.
It started out as a bit of a lark, we’ll admit, but we soon fell madly in love with this new sense of purpose, regardless of how many times friends and complete strangers invoked the famous Homer Simpson bit about how you don’t win friends with salad. This happened a lot, and I expect it to continue happening. (Because it is so hee-larious and how can anyone resist.)
It turns out that The Simpsons were just plain wrong. We’ve made over 73,000 friends since then (including subscribers in every country in the world). And they come back to this spot, week after week, month after month, year after year to serve themselves from our growing salad bar (which, by the way, is indexed here and archived here). And since those early days, we’ve also been featured in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Fortune, The Harvard Business Review podcast, Harvard After Hours, The Guardian, Outside, The Wall Street Journal, the Art of Eating, Heritage Radio Network, and The Sporkful podcast.
It has been, for the most part, a bowl of cherries. (And here is the recipe for a salad made from an actual bowl of cherries, from this issue.)
Back in those early days, we regularly invited friends and strangers into the salad lab and wrote about it, and our very first guest was the great Mollie Katzen, a longtime idol whose beloved and pioneering Moosewood Cookbook taught me how to make a really great green salad.
Talking by Zoom call with Katzen (I was in the mountains of North Carolina, she was in California) was a true highlight of my food-journalism career. So, in celebration of our 4th anniversary, I can’t resist sharing the passage featuring Katzen, from our very first newsletter, here, along with the recipe for Moosewood’s March Hare Salad, which she updated for the Department of Salad. Read on below, if you please:
🥗 🥗🥗
FROM ISSUE #1 OF THE DEPARTMENT OF SALAD:
IF YOU’RE OLDER THAN 40, you probably remember a time before arugula ascended. Back then, we ate iceberg with chunks of tomato and white onion—all drowned in oil and vinegar or creamy dressings from bottles, which were more like party dip. We had powdered garlic in lieu of fresh. We ate spinach from a can. And we liked it! We didn’t know better.
Eventually, all over the country, restaurants got modern salad bars—and all hell broke loose. Ours was at the Pizza Hut. We ran up to the trough after ordering our pie then wobbled back to our seats in our bell bottoms, balancing giant pyramids of unnaturally crisp iceberg that never went bad, which we’d covered in Thousand Island and blue cheese and piled with more shredded cheese and rock-hard croutons and Bac-Os and canned black olive slices and red kidney beans and green pepper strips and sliced beets and cottage cheese and mung bean sprouts and on and on. We got our money’s worth!
The DOS loves a good salad bar; we’ll be talking about them more extensively in a future newsletter.
But for now, as the DOS CEO, I’m interested in how far we’ve come since then, and where we may be headed. Which brings me to our first CHEF SALAD guest, Mollie Katzen, the somewhat mysterious and absolutely iconic cookbook author responsible for the original “Moosewood Cookbook” (among many others, including one for children, called “Salad People”). Moosewood, one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time, was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2007. It’s named for the famous vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca NY, founded in 1973 by Katzen and her brother Josh and a group of friends. Katzen is also a musician and an artist—a renaissance woman if ever there was one. Her papers have been collected by the Smithsonian Institution and are now part of The National Museum of American History. You can get a look at her art here, on her Instagram page.
In spite of all of this, Katzen was surprised to hear that she’s the reason I learned to cook beyond what I learned from my mother (my copy of Moosewood is held together with a big rubber band). And she is definitely responsible for my mad ability to make an excellent green salad—layering in the olive oil and acid and the snippets, shavings, and slices of goodies in a specific order, building the salad and the dressing directly in the bowl as you go. The salad section in Moosewood was ahead of its time and opened my mind to the ideas of warm salads and “grain bowls” long before those types of things were in fashion.
Katzen is from Rochester NY, where she and her brothers grew up in a Kosher home, eating frozen fruits and vegetables through winter. By the time she’d moved away and learned to cook out in San Francisco then returned East to join her brother in the Moosewood venture, certain ingredients we take for granted today were still extremely limited. And yet she gave us great salad. (Prayer Hands Emoji)
“You couldn’t find olive oil in any of the grocery stores!” she said. “And not because they’d run out but because they didn’t carry it in the first place.” I tried to imagine this world, and could not, even though I think my mother bought her olive oil in a tiny bottle, like precious perfume.
Katzen is charming and fascinating, and we ended up talking for a long time, about things that had nothing to do with food, much less salad. While we were fretting about politics, and I was starting to feel afraid that I was falling back into smothering darkness, she mentioned that she was going out to her garden, in Berkeley, to pick some frisee, which they sure as hell didn’t have back at the Pizza Hut salad trough, or any of the wide array of fresh greens and herbs and vegetables we get to eat today.
Katzen’s frisee made me feel happy and advanced, despite the regressive, backward era we’re living through.
But one of the things that impacted salad most in this country, Katzen pointed out, was the end of seasonality— thanks (if that’s the word) to free trade. “There was no such thing as asparagus out of season. You couldn’t get peaches and grapes. You had to wait for tomatoes. Strawberries were around only in season. Everything was special because you had wait to get it. And it was all local—local wasn’t this thing, and neither was seasonal eating. You didn’t even have food on the east coast that was grown in the middle of the country.”
While I was writing this piece, I noticed that the Moosewood section titled “Leafy Green Salads”—the one that changed my salad life forever—does not include fresh herbs as part of the regular mix. It seemed impossible to imagine not having basil at my fingertips. But it’s also natural.
Salad has moved forward and backward and forward again in many ways since Moosewood was born—and so have we. It can be both exhilarating and distressing.
But one thing that hasn’t budged is that Katzen—who changed the way America eats— is still extremely particular about her salads, especially when it comes to the leaves, which must be perfectly dry. “I pay attention to detail. I wash my greens then spin them and spin some more. If I’m having guests, I start spinning the day before!” she said, laughing. “I want my greens dry so I can relax and enjoy.
“I like a tossed salad that has really nice leaf lettuce. I want them to stay crisp—so the cup-shaped leaves, the little gems, Belgian endive, and I love radicchio. I don’t use just any lettuce. And for me, a leaf salad is much more fun if I sprinkle in grains. Like popped quinoa—you can pop quinoa. Or you can cook it with less water than it says. I do 1 to 1 liquid. But you can also pop it in a pan. Heat a good heavy pan, sprinkle in quinoa. It’s so much fun to do.”
A couple of Katzen’s favorite salads have become mine, too, starting with one that quelled my worries about the coming cold months around here. I made it immediately; it was gorgeous and delicious.
“It’s a lot of really stern and somewhat bitter chicories—which I love; they’re a good winter solution because I think they’re easier for you to find in winter. I’ll do a chicory, sometimes with no lettuce, and a bosc pear chopped up in there, and some blue cheese, maybe walnut.”
Like people on Twitter, I responded with: Recipe please?
“So: you coat radicchio with olive oil, sprinkle in some salt and let it sit there until you serve it. You add the acid at the end, because that’s what wilts everything,” she instructed. “Lot of olive oil, a tiny bit of salt, and a little bit of lemon juice, and finally the cheese and nuts—and everything, always, has to be absolutely fresh!”
I started eating it with my hands, rolled up like spring rolls, before I’d finished making it. It was amazing.
After we talked about the arc of the salad, I wondered aloud about the very idea of what a salad is. We both agreed that 1.) it’s a hard topic and 2.) a salad can be absolutely anything. Except maybe this “salad.” You must draw a line. But the point is, in order to keep your salad life vigorous, you have to be willing to ignore the instinct to think of a salad as just a bunch of leaves.
For example: the March Hare, from Moosewood. It was inspired by a pre-made chivey cucumber and cottage cheese concoction in a carton called Spring Garden Salad, purchased from Hank, the Katzens’ Rochester milkman (who had a crush on Katzen’s mother), back in the day when each house had a special compartment near the door for dropping off their dairy purchases. She created the March Hare— “It’s cottage cheese filled with even more chopped vegetables”—out of nostalgia. The gang at Moosewood thought she was off her rocker.
“We put it on the menu, and it was immediately very popular,” she said. “It would be a lunch special, on lettuce leaves with a couple of garnishes. The White Rabbit version was with fruit and toasted nuts. I always used to add toasted sunflower seeds and nuts to everything. Nobody did that back then.”
Katzen did me the favor of making March Hare Salad more au courant for the year 2020, by adding lemon zest, and fresh herbs and a few other flourishes. Rather than serving it on a lettuce leaf, though, I made my batch and put it in a Tupperware container on ice to take along on a trip I really did not want to go on. It was so delicious and so lovely that after spooning up a bite at a stoplight I had to pull over and continue eating on the side of the road, saying Mmmmmmm to myself in an otherwise empty car. My trip got better almost instantly.
*RECIPE: March Hare Salad 2020
NOTE: The amount and kind of fresh herbs you use here are completely optional. The directions are a good starting point.
3 cups of cottage cheese (both Mollie and I prefer a dryer curd; I especially love Good Culture brand)
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
¼ cup toasted salted sunflower seeds (pepitas would be good, too)
1 medium carrot, grated
1 medium ripe tomato, only in season, diced (I used a cup of halved grape tomatoes, which was nice for the texture)
5 to 6 large radishes, diced
Red onion, diced finely, about ¼ cup (about a quarter of a small one)
1 small red, yellow, or orange bell pepper, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 small cucumber, diced (I used an English one)
½ packed cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
¼ cup chopped fresh dill
¼ cup chopped fresh mint
(choose herbs that you like best, but no rosemary or sage or wintery herbs)
1 tablespoon lemon zest (optional, but highly recommended)
2 to 3 tablespoons lemon juice, to taste
Pepper
Salt (optional)
Combine all ingredients--except tomato--and chill well. Add tomatoes before serving. I drizzled mine with some good olive oil before serving, too. Because this is 2020, and I can. So so so freaking good.
WE DO NOT LOVE TO BRING IT UP. But, it takes two kinds of lettuce (🥬 + $$) to keep the Department of Salad going. The best way to support us, if you don’t already: Press the green button (and get full access to all the salad in our enormous archive). Or give a gift!
Now, no one misses the horrors and sadness of the pandemic, of course, but rereading that interview, I do sort of miss those days of living in rural seclusion, where time seemed to move much much more slowly, and I was able to have longer talks with fascinating people. So another way we’re celebrating our fourth anniversary is by inaugurating a new feature, The Official Department of Salad Questionnaire, to be answered by people we admire, who share new recipes with us here.
Turshen loves teaching people to cook, and she does so in the friendliest way (not just through her books, by the way, but in online courses and through her newsletter). The book is a welcoming, homey, family-feeling affair, whose title tells you a lot. As does the fact that Turshen dedicated What Goes with What to her parents—who designed and illustrated it! (Turshen took most of the photos herself.) And as does the fact that inher intro (which starts right off the bat with a useful tip: put a wet paper towel under your cutting board to keep it in place), Turshen mentions that she “thinks in charts,” which help make “the infiniteness of cooking feel so much more manageable to me.”
As a person with a very messy mind, I desperately want to become a chart person, now. There’s something both calming and intriguing about having the basics of what makes a good recipes mapped out this way, but it’s also inspiring. If you’ve ever returned from your market with a random grab-and-go array of pretty ingredients, only to stand in your kitchen wondering what in the world to do with it all before it rots, this book contains the toolkit you need to figure it out for yourself. But only after you’ve practiced by making such alluring dishes from the book as Mushroom Cacciatore; Beef, Spinach, and Feta Meatballs; Stir-Fried Hoisin Chicken with Broccoli; or Black Bean and Cheddar Cornbread Pie. Or the Raspberry Chocolate Cobbler or the Pear, Cherry, and Almond Crisp.
I could go on. But let’s do the DOS Questionnaire instead.
🥬 🥬 🥬 THE DEPARTMENT OF SALAD QUESTIONNAIRE, with Julia Turshen
DOS: Why is Salad the world’s most perfect dish?
JT:Because it can be absolutely anything and, at its best, it contains such a wonderful mix of textures, flavors and colors.
DOS: When you’re asked to “just bring a salad “ (as if that’s the LEAST a person could do), what do you show up with?
JT: Usually something that won't wilt easily and can be made ahead and enjoyed at room temperature. Such as the Farro + Roasted Vegetable Salad from What Goes with What.
DOS: How do you feel about the (insulting) term “word salad.”
JT: I feel like it's misleading as salads aren't inherently overwrought. I guess writing and salad-making both benefit from a good edit?!
DOS: What makes a great salad?
JT:There is no great salad without great dressing.
DOS: What is the saddest salad anyone has ever tried to serve you?
JT:Wilted, slimy salad greens feel so sad to me. Crunchy is always happy!
DOS: Is there ever a time or place, aside from behind the wheel of a speeding car, when serving salad is NOT appropriate?
JT:Is this a trick question?
DOS. Maybe, maybe not. What is your personal go-to salad and why?
JT:I love a chopped salad. My usual chopped salad (which I offer a recipe for in WGWW under the title "My Usual Chopped Salad") contains romaine, red cabbage, grated carrots, chickpeas, roasted almonds, golden raisins, feta and a creamy, mustardy dressing. It's got so much texture and saltiness, nuttiness, sweetness...the whole package!
I love a chopped salad, too, but the salad I have for you today is Turshen’s Vegan Kale Caesar with Crispy Chickpeas. I’m not vegan, but this salad has made me give some serious thought to becoming one. If this salad were available in a restaurant near me, I’d go there weekly and order it every time. If they ever stopped serving it, I’d stop going to that restaurant and maybe even prank call them now and then. It’s a dish that repays you with a lot more luscious flavor (the dressing bowled me over) and wonderful textures (tenderized kale with slightly crunchy, garlicky chickpeas) than anyone deserves for the small amount of effort you must put into it. And not that it matters but this recipe will go down in my personal food autobiography as the one that made me appreciate the beauty of vegan mayo, words I never thought I’d hear myself say. Plus, it reminded me of what a great umami-explosion ingredient nutritional yeast is. Blended together with a lot of capers (and their brine), this dressing combination might make you forget the eggy version of Caesar vinaigrette forever.
I’m giving you this photo of MY VERSION of Turshen’s Kale Caesar so you can see an amateur version. Her photo (below, with recipe) may be more gorgeous, but I’m betting they both taste amazing.
I also have what I consider not just a celebratory salad but a salad that establishes once and for all my feelings about the putrid idea that salad is a “diet food”: my own Chips and Dip Salad, which is exactly what it sounds like, a salad with romaine, onion -dip dressing, and a mess of potato chips.
It sounds conceptually iffy, I know, but if you hang around on the fringes of the salad community (I just made that up; the only salad community I know of is right here in this newsletter), you pick up on some crazily alluring stuff that turns out to be delicious.
The hot hottest potato chip salad out there right now, apparently, is served at Chef Wylie Dufresne’s Stretch Pizza. After doing a little research, I discovered that it was inspired by another, earlier potato chip salad—how long has this been going on???—from the Del Posto cookbook, which I own but had never really investigated much. Stretch’s version appears to be quite lightly dressed. Del Posto’s uses homemade fingerling potato chips and is dressed in nothing but lemon juice and olive oil, and includes shaved Parm and oven-dried cherry tomatoes. But I’m never making my own potato chips, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how both salads seem to have forgotten how much chips love onion dip, so here we are.
Enjoy them both, and in a couple of days I’ll be sending out one more recipe from Turshen’s new book, by way of the Department of Salad Dressing Room.
🍑 🍒 🍏 🍋
ONE SMALL THING BEFORE YOU HIT THE RECIPES?
Would you mind hitting the ❤️ button at the top left or bottom left of this newsletter if you enjoy being here? (If you don’t enjoy being here, use this ☠️). It means more to us than you might imagine. XO—Emily
🍅 🥕 🥬 🌿
RECIPE: Vegan Kale Caesar with Crispy Chickpeas, from “What Goes with What,” by Julia Turshen
Absolutely freaking delicious. YOU MUST MAKE THIS SALAD. (📸 Julia Turshen)
Serves about 4
JULIA TURSHEN’S RECIPE NOTE:Briny, salty capers take the place of anchovies, and nutritional yeast adds all the umami cheesiness of Parmesan in this great vegan Caesar. You’ll end up with about 1½ cups of dressing, so you’ll have some left over. Use it for other salads or as a dip for cut-up vegetables or potato chips. If you don’t have a blender, use a food processor, and if you don’t have either one, finely mince the garlic and capers together on your cutting board, scrape into a bowl, and then whisk in everything else (it won’t be supersmooth, but just call it “Rustic Caesar” and you’ll be fine). If you have an air fryer, cook the chickpeas in that (375ºF for 12 to 15 minutes, shaking the basket halfway through). You can also swap croutons for the chickpeas.
For the chickpeas:
One 15-ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon sweet paprika
For the dressing:
2 large garlic cloves
One 3.5-ounce jar capers (including the brine!)
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
½ cup vegan mayonnaise
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
For the salad:
1 bunch (1 pound) kale (curly or lacinato), tough stems removed, roughly chopped
Half a lemon
A large pinch of kosher salt
First, prepare the chickpeas: Preheat your oven to 425ºF (218°C)
Place a paper towel on a sheet pan, put the chickpeas on top of it, and roll them around a bit to dry them off. Remove the paper towel and drizzle the chickpeas with the oil. Sprinkle with the salt, garlic powder, and paprika and use your hands to mix everything well. Roast, shaking the pan once or twice during cooking, until the chickpeas are browned and crispy, about 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool before using (they will crisp as they cool).
Next, make the dressing: Place all the dressing ingredients in the pitcher of a blender and puree until smooth. Season the dressing to taste with more salt and/or pepper if needed.
Finish the salad: Place the kale in a large bowl and squeeze the juice from the lemon half over it. Sprinkle with the salt and use your hands to scrunch it all together. Really get in there—don’t be shy! This will help make the kale easier to eat. Drizzle with ½ cup of the dressing and use your hands or tongs to mix the salad well. Transfer to a serving platter (or just serve from the bowl).
Top the salad with the chickpeas and drizzle with another ⅓ cup or so of the dressing. Serve immediately.
Serves 4 to 6, depending on whether you’re serving as a salad course or as an appetizer or snax
I built this as a “hand salad.” Put it on the table and let people grab the romaine leaves heaped with my Onion Dip Dressing, chips, and chives. In my photo, above, I left the chips whole and added the dressing and chives last simply because it ended up being more attractive. But the best way to make sure every bite gets chips and dip is to break up the chips—don’t crush them, just break them into pieces; you don’t want dust—and shower the salad with them. You could also chop the romaine, dress it, and top the salad with the crushed chips and chives. Or you could line up the romaine side by side on a long platter then ply them with a belt of toppings. Any way you do it you’ve got that cold, crisp, creamy, and crunchy combo. The Onion Dip Dressing tastes more like real, disgustingly luscious grocery store onion dip when you leave out the fresh garlic. But I use it because it’s fantastic and I love garlic. Up to you.
7 or 8 ounces small Romaine leaves—you’ll probably have to use the organic packaged kind like I did (or use Little Gems) and you want to make sure they’re good and cold
3 heaping cups of your favorite potato chips (I used kettle-cooked but plain thin chips work; salt and vinegar are not bad either, if that’s your thing, but I prefer regular chip flavored chips)
Onion Dip Dressing (method below)
¼ cup chopped chives
Arrange cold crisp romaine leaves in a bowl or on a platter and drizzle generously with the dressing, making sure you leave undressed areas as “handles” for picking up the leaves. Top with the potato chips and chives and serve immediately.
DOS Onion Dip Dressing
Very few fresh ingredients were harmed to make this dressing; it’s mostly pantry stuff.
½ cup plus 1 tablespoon sour cream
½ cup buttermilk (make it if you don’t have it, like this)
3 tablespoons mayonnaise
Juice of ½ lemon
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon dried chopped onion
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 clove garlic grated (optional)
Big dash (or two) of Tabasco
1 teaspoon Worcesschisirirehsire (I vowed never to look up the spelling of this bottled sauce again) sauce
½ teaspoon salt (more to taste)
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 teaspoons dried parsley (optional)
In a bowl, whisk together all ingredients until well incorporated. Let sit for at least 5 minutes before tasting for extra salt, tabasco, lemon—whatever. Refrigerate until very cold before serving.
Now that I am already seeing holiday lights up in my neighborhood (or maybe a lot of people are opening discos), it seems like a good time to remind everyone what a nice gift a subscription to the Department of Salad makes. You can use the button below.
🥬 🥬🥬 🥬That’s It! We’re done here! We’ll see you soon with a recipe for authentic Chicken Paprikash. I’m kidding—it’s going to be salad.
🥬🥬🥬 ONE MORE THING: Please remember that while you may receive The Department of Salad as an e-mail, all issues of the newsletter—along with any corrections, the archive, and our Fancy New Recipe Index—are always available at the Department of Salad website. (You can always search “The Department of Salad” or go directly to emilyrnunn.substack.com.) All the recipes from all the newsletters will be there for you. To search the Index, simply use the search function (command F) that produces a search bar in the upper-right-hand corner of the page.
🥬 🥬ALSO, I’M WONDERING: Do you follow me on Instagram? My feed is not a consistent array of uniformly styled photos of perfect food, which I know is what I’m supposed to offer. But I get too bored. So it includes videos of giant pandas loudly eating carrots and personal crap representative of my bad personality. I’d love to have you. Go here: Emily’s Instagram
🥬 IN THE MEANTIME: If you feel like sharing the Department of Salad with friends or family who deserve it, please do so with the buttons below—it would mean the world to us! Thanks for being a subscriber.
As soon as I see the DOS newsletter in my inbox I click the heart. Then I eagerly read the whole thing and when I get to the end I'm vexed because I want to click the heart again but it's already clicked. Substack could help me out here by providing a multi-click heart option. ❤️ 💙 💜
Congratulations Emily! You deserve every bit of the green stuff! 🥗🥒🥬🥦🍆🥑🥕🫒
As soon as I see the DOS newsletter in my inbox I click the heart. Then I eagerly read the whole thing and when I get to the end I'm vexed because I want to click the heart again but it's already clicked. Substack could help me out here by providing a multi-click heart option. ❤️ 💙 💜