Life Is Short (and Strange). Why Wait Until You're Dead to Overdress Your Winter Salads?
Have a Roasted Delicata Squash and Radicchio Salad Drenched in Orange Marmalade Balsamic Vinaigrette or an Endive Pear Salad, with Toasted Hazelnuts and Loads of Creamy Parmigiano Reggiano Dressing!
ADAGES AND PROVERBS become everlasting because they reflect common sense, right? Waste not want not. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. A stitch in time saves nine. But by the time I’d finally figured out what these three particular sayings actually meant (I was probably in college), they struck me as priggish and dark and un-fun, like something you’d hear from a put-upon fusspot in a calico dress and a rocking chair, who’d wasted her entire life darning socks that didn’t even have holes yet.
Could common sense be nothing but a lie? Like groupthink?
I bring this up because I’ve been pondering the gap between the lovely, respectable images we wish to project to the world and what we actually do.
I’m not going to burden you with my peevish laundry list of mankind’s transgressions in this arena (which I threw together during a recent moment of spiritual shakiness that left me feeling exhausted, guilty, and somewhat doomed).
But I will give you one quick example: When I first moved to Atlanta a few years ago, a woman who had a giant ❤️ bumper sticker on her SUV tried to throw a hamburger in my open window while passing me, because I was driving too slowly for her, on a 35mph suburban road where kids were riding bikes and people were jogging. (Beyond the red heart, I don’t know what the bumper sticker said, because she was driving too fast for me to read it. Also, it could have been a chicken sandwich for all I know.)
My point is that many of the aphorisms we repeat in public and display on our T-shirts and bumpers and billboards seem to be the same ones we completely ignore in our daily practice of being humans.
Some of this behavior is clearly malignant: We are bossy, phony, selfish hypocrites. Most of it is benign and sweetly naive: We are innocent creatures who want to leave the world a better place when we die, but who also hope bumper stickers have the power of incantations, which will magically spare us the strenuous application required to become truly good people.
Whatever. Who knows why all of us are not perfect and good 24 hours a day? Or even nice for ten minutes? Luckily, we live in a chaotic, upside-down world that often makes no sense, which we can use as an excuse for being awful.
Lately, for instance, I find myself feeling holy and pure for not telling my cute dog to go straight to hell when she wants to go out for the 45th time in 10 minutes. “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, Cookie,” I’ll yell at her instead. Or “The enemy of my enemy is my friend!” Or “Worry is like a rocking chair; it goes back and forth but gets you nowhere!”
Anyway! I believe that the saying “Less is more” tends to be the one that contemporary society treasures most and puts into practice least, possibly because in the back of our jumbled collective memory, we can still recall how terrifying it was just trying to stay alive as scrawny hunter-gatherers in the un-luxurious grasslands and woodlands of ancient Ethiopia.
We have evolved, of course! (Albeit to varying degrees, on a person-to-person basis). So we try in all our modernity to remember that we don’t need more useless, excessive crap in our lives—that we have easy access to and many undangerous ways of procuring shelter, pelts, food, tools.
We go around braying that Less is more! And telling others to Keep it simple! Until something rattles our faith in ourselves and our relatively comfortable way of life. The next thing we know, we’re doing anything we can to separate ourselves from the terrifying, meager lives our earliest ancestors led, even though we’re 1.8 million years past all that. We suddenly need to build protective fortresses made of bigger houses, more cute clothes, trips to fancy restaurants, ornate architecture, and extra curlicues in our interior decor. Less is more? Yeah, sure sure—but give me all the kitchen gadgets!
For me personally, during my recent and ongoing existential upheaval, this cultural phenomenon has translated not into gathering more things but into tossing more and more and more salad dressing onto my salads. Which feels pretty lucky, considering.
I’ve probably yelled “Don’t drown your salad!” at plenty of people in my lifetime, including myself, but lately I have nonetheless been in a happy state of dressing-drunk euphoria, inspired by a salad I recently had at a newish and delicious restaurant here in Atlanta, Chef Kevin Maxey’s Pendolino. It was described on the menu as, simply, “Endive Salad: hazelnuts, green apple, montasio cheese.” I wasn’t expecting much, and when it came to the table, it didn’t look all that gorgeous, frankly—plus it seemed very overdressed to me. But when I took a bite, it turned out to be pure heaven—fresh and light and not the least bit heavy; later, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.