Salads Get Weary, Yes They Do Get Weary

Wearing the same old shaggy dress(ing) 🎶 👗 (Five dressings. Plus: Joan Didion's Parsley Salad)

Four dressings and a funeral. Not really. It’s four dressings and a dip that can also be a dressing.

WHEN IT COMES TO DRESSING, we’ve been in a rut lately here at the Department of Salad—probably all our adult lives, actually. But we’re not referring to our uniform of turtlenecks, thick glasses, athletic socks, and clogs. Instead, what feels a little “I give up” is how we dress all the salads we don’t put on display.

After all, how we conduct ourselves when no one is looking is the true measure of our character, our zest for life. And are you truly and fully participating in the strange wonder of human existence if you keep using the same vinaigrette or dressing over and over and over?

I do not think you are. I don’t think I am.

The boys in the lab tend to be default lemon, olive oil, and flakey sea salters, partly because “that’s what Stanley Tucci does” and partly because they’re lazy buffoons who I should have fired ages ago since they’re always on vacation and refuse to use a vegetable peeler (they don’t like the sound it makes). Right now, they’re in Marfa, for the third time this year.

Tarragon: My favorite herb, and the most elusive to me.

And in spite of all my preachiness, whenever I make a big clean-out-the-fridge salad—with greens and whatever else needs to go—I automatically shake up a jar of My Usual Mustard Vinaigrette.

Which, obviously, I love. It’s delicious.

But I didn’t realize how long I’d been making my mustard vinaigrette until my cousins gave me a notebook from my late Aunt Mariah’s kitchen desk, which she kept next to the phone to jot down friends’ and relatives’ and other visitors’ new mailing addresses and newfangled cellular numbers, and driving directions to the beach and the lake, along with little hand-drawn maps. As a writer, I absolutely treasure this sort of thing.

On keeping a notebook: It’s a good place for salad dressings.

Along with my early 1990s address, on West 103rd Street in NYC (where I lived with a man whose most charming feature, aside from his curly hair, was that he never said an unkind word about even the worst person—he may have once called someone a noodge), my page also featured my mustard vinaigrette recipe at the time, written in my own bizarre scrawl, along with Aunt Mariah’s notes about arugula, which was probably not yet available at the Galax, Virginia, Kroger back then. I was and still am astonished to see that it included two teaspoons of sugar and a low ratio of acid to oil. What was I making? Fudge?

Granted, salad dressing is a fungible concept. So over the years my recipe has changed, for the better, sometimes including a clove of garlic or some minced red onion, maybe some lemon zest—I’m a madwoman.

Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s grave at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. (Getty Images)

But it’s still my usual mustard vinaigrette, the dressing I joke about bottling, the one people expect of me. The question is: Do I want to die having made the same dressing over and over and over, to the point that the recipe ends up on my tombstone, like Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson (Nov. 26, 1921 - June 10, 2009), whose final resting place at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn is famously adorned with her spritz cookie recipe?

Nothing against Miller-Dawson—but, no, I do not. And now I can’t stop thinking about making sure no one tries to put a stone carving of a jar with a tight-fitting lid containing my mustard vinaigrette atop my tombstone. I probably don’t have to worry since I can’t think of anyone who’ll make such an enormous fuss when I die. In fact, I’ll probably end up like movie Mozart, my body rolled into a mass grave and spritzed with quicklime.

Tahini, garlic, lemon, yogurt: all you need for a heavenly dressing and/or dip.

But moving along: We tend to offer a dressing with every salad at the DOS, but we’ve also given you several All Dressing Issues. And all of this has been leading up to the fact we have another all-dressing issue today, except that this time around it feels more pressing, because my legacy may be at stake.