True or False: The Best Salads Are the Simplest Salads
Try my persimmon and pear salad or my shaved Brussels sprout hullabaloo and get back to me.
CERTAIN PEOPLE LOVE TO insist that the very best food is always the simplest food. And I’m not sure how to even feel about that. (Plus, I wonder: Have these people never met lasagna?)
Anyway, some of them curate extremely popular Instagram feeds dedicated to a spare aesthetic that verges on frankly fetishistic. For example: brightly lit white plates on a white background onto which one gorgeous sliver of a vegetable or fruit, etc., is placed and posed like a 1940s pinup girl, on a gloss of deep green olive oil, with nothing but an herb leaf and a crushed pink peppercorn covering her nakedness.
It’s all very sexy and it gets billions of “likes” from giant social media audiences (some of whom I imagine eat Beanee Weanees every single day, not that there’s anything wrong with that). And since this ethos tends to be fruit and vegetable focussed—and since, like most people, I’d just as soon eat a peach or tomato as turn it into a salad or anything else, really—I’m as big a fan of this kind of stark, elemental beauty as the next person.
In fact, I often find myself falling down the pristine-plate rabbit hole on Instagram, envisioning the day when my life becomes so ordered that all my food looks this geometrically perfect, too. In my imagination, lovely, balanced salads employing just 2 extremely delicious ingredients appear on a plate when I press a button, like they do on the Jetsons, and then a robot does the dishes.
Because extreme simplicity almost always seems futuristic to me, which is why I often suspect that it takes a heck of a lot of engineering to achieve, the same way the “no makeup” look is much more laborious than no makeup.
But who cares? This Instagram food is so pretty it should be in a museum. And I love it almost as much as I love my own messier, more chaotic children. It makes me happy any time fruit and vegetable and herb arrangements are elevated to the level of art (or included in art); plus it gives a bit of credence to my decision, back in October of 2020, to dedicate my remaining years on this blasted, beautiful planet to salad.
Which is why we are all gathered here today. We love salads. And if I have conveyed anything at all over the last three years, I hope it is this: To each his own salad, a dish that cannot be reduced to one ethos or style or dictated to by mere fashion. Salad is the most flexible, forgiving, wide-ranging, diverse, open-hearted, multifaceted, complex, difficult, generous dish on the table. Anything your imagination can conjure can be a salad, and there are no “bad” salads, except maybe this one.
All we ask of you, here at the Department of Salad, is that you always feel free to fly your own personal salad freak flag, regardless of how society tries to push you around. And all we ask of salad is that it never stops madly galloping all over the place, breaking rules, surprising people, and making us really notice the beauty and strangeness of our food. (Speaking of which, here’s a terrific piece by Julia Moskin, about food arranging/plating fads, Why Is My Dessert on a Pedestal? 7 New Styles at the Restaurant Table.)