Salads Get Weary, Yes They Do Get Weary
Wearing the same old shaggy dress(ing) đ¶ đ (Five dressings. Plus: Joan Didion's Parsley Salad)
WHEN IT COMES TO DRESSING, weâve been in a rut lately here at the Department of Saladâprobably all our adult lives, actually. But weâre not referring to our uniform of turtlenecks, thick glasses, athletic socks, and clogs. Instead, what feels a little âI give upâ is how we dress all the salads we donât 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 donât think I am.
The boys in the lab tend to be default lemon, olive oil, and flakey sea salters, partly because âthatâs what Stanley Tucci doesâ and partly because theyâre lazy buffoons who I should have fired ages ago since theyâre always on vacation and refuse to use a vegetable peeler (they donât like the sound it makes). Right now, theyâre in Marfa, for the third time this year.
And in spite of all my preachiness, whenever I make a big clean-out-the-fridge saladâwith greens and whatever else needs to goâI automatically shake up a jar of My Usual Mustard Vinaigrette.
Which, obviously, I love. Itâs delicious.
But I didnât realize how long Iâd been making my mustard vinaigrette until my cousins gave me a notebook from my late Aunt Mariahâs kitchen desk, which she kept next to the phone to jot down friendsâ and relativesâ and other visitorsâ 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.
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 personâhe 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 Mariahâs 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 zestâIâm a madwoman.
But itâs 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-Dawsonâbut, no, I do not. And now I canât 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 donât have to worry since I canât think of anyone whoâll make such an enormous fuss when I die. In fact, Iâll probably end up like movie Mozart, my body rolled into a mass grave and spritzed with quicklime.
But moving along: We tend to offer a dressing with every salad at the DOS, but weâve 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.
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