The State of Modern Salad Making 🥬
Could a new era be dawning? Get out your salad bowls and your bongos!
THE BOYS IN THE LAB AND I POSITIVELY LOVE people who refuse to let themselves be defined by the shallow labels others would pin upon them. We say Godspeed to anyone who dares assert their truest self in a world that often (and often unkindly) swings between crowd-thinky cliques and comfortably numb conformists.
It takes so much grit for humans to pull off this sort of soloist’s bravery, of course. (And I’d like to remind anyone who attempts it that the minds of those labelers are small, dark prisons rather than glowing, endless, blooming gardens; they just can’t help it.)
Even though salads have a much easier time of it, I can’t help admiring independent thinking in salad making, too, at a time when an enormous number of Americans continue to believe salads are dietetical (I made that word up). And apparently, judging from the internet, they have also decided that there are only about 5 types of salad—20 at most. And that salads have categories—I guess to make sure that if anybody threatens to sneak off and make some salads outside official set parameters they can be given a citation? (The questions below appeared to me during a routine Google search for something else entirely.)
How such short-sightedness has afflicted salad in particular is inscrutable to me, as I have mentioned many times before (especially during the early days of the Department of Salad); you will find one of my favorite discussions of the idea of American salad here.
The only thing that is achieved by attempting to tell salad what it is and what it is not, or what it should and should not be—a salad can’t be hot! it has to have greens! pasta salad is terrible!—is the absolute assurance that you are going to miss out. And it’s good to remember that the force that through the green fuse drives the salads doesn’t last forever, if you know what I mean. And what I mean is that we’re all going to die, so don’t wait to open up your mind.
It’s not like I’m the first person to notice the generally myopic view of salad. In fact, one of my favorite salad books, sent to me as a gift back in 2020 by a thoughtful former colleague at the New Yorker, is the early-twentieth century “A Book of Salads, by Alfred Suzanne (who includes a recipe in his book that begins “Clean a large eel and cut it lengthways to take out the backbone. . .”). In the introduction to my circa 1920 edition, C. Herman Senn writes:
“To many persons the word “salad” represents but a very limited opportunity, and yet every month of the year practically brings in some kind of material wherewith a delicious salad can be made. Salad making is not, as a rule, classed as an art, inasmuch as everybody thinks he or she can make a salad; but there is, I venture to assert, a great difference between a well-dressed salad and the dishes one meets with at times, which are given that name.”
Which sometimes makes me wonder if much has changed, aside from the fact that you can buy your eel already broken down. But lately I think there’s hope—and I have a distinct feeling that the salad arts are really beginning to flourish as a discipline. The salads that get the most attention are often attached to movie stars—the Jennifer Aniston lunch salad; Olivia Wilde’s heartbreaking dressing. And, of course, that super-viral green goddess TikTok salad. I feel like I speak for salads when I say we’ll take all the flashy PR we can get.
But to me, one of the most exciting developments: There have been wonderful books dedicated exclusively to salad in the last decade or so. (We’ve been happy to feature some of them, here, here. And I’ve got the skinny on one or two new ones on their way.)
But my vision for the salad world includes major universities offering graduate study in salad making, with outposts in every country, and lots of cross-pollination and intellectual (and herbal) exchange. Even though I’m sort of joking about Salad University International, I often think about possible professors and chairs and presidents and the board of trustees.
Every once in a while, you come across people who seem to be inventing their own kind of recipe music, and one of them for me is Ixta Belfrage. She’s so creative and adventurous—I’d definitely have her on my academic staffing short list. I was completely unfamiliar with her until this year, when I received her book, Mezcla: Recipes to Excite, while judging a cookbook contest. I loved it immediately: it really did excite me, and not just because of the terrific salads. But this is a salad newsletter.
I thought I’d seen it all when it comes to celery salads, but Belfrage’s version below is like the Russian Constructivist’s celery salad. It turns your perception of celery on its head and makes you appreciate the vegetable all over again. (I set off the fire alarm in my apartment while pan-charring sliced stalks and I’d do it again.) And the roasted eggplant salad, with torn mozzarella and an anchovy cilantro salsa, is everything everywhere all at once.