Magical Lemon Dressing + A Salad to Go with It

Even if you're not a "lemon person," you'll love this extraordinary dressing—tossed with arugula, spooned over steamed or roasted vegetables, or as a sauce for baking your favorite fish. 💥

THANK GOD FOR LEMONS! What would the world do without lemons! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before lemons.

I’m paraphrasing the 19th-century English cleric and wit Sydney Smith, who was talking about tea here rather than lemons. He is, incidentally, the same wit (some might say “dork”) who wrote that famous poem about salad that everyone quotes if you tell them you write a salad newsletter (not that that happens to anyone but me).

If you know the Department of Salad at all, you know that our world would completely stop spinning if lemons became extinct. So I was thrilled when I came across this surprising and impossibly delicious salad in Sheela Prakash’s upcoming book, Salad Seasons: Vegetable-Forward Dishes All Year, which we featured in the last bulletin. (If you haven’t placed her recipe for Spring Carrots with Burnt Saffron Butter and Labneh in your “to-make” file, you really should.)

Toasted almonds rocket a lemony dressing and its salad into the heavens.

The dressing uses a whole lemon, peel, pulp, juice, and all. (You do remove the seeds, but we used seedless lemons.)

This is a trick/technique we have long admired in desserts—one of our favorite examples is Lazy Mary’s Lemon Tart—but that we’ve never seen in salad dressings. Although we did feature Rozanne Gold’s Fried Lemon and Zucchini Salad in this early issue, and we’ve shown you how to make preserved lemons, which are delicious incorporated into dressings. But it’s not the same thing! (And while we’re talking lemons, have you ever tried my Aunt Mariah’s Lemon Sponge Cups?)