A salad needn’t – shouldn’t – be insensible. They can be made of almost anything you like. So why not finish just that and fabricate (to make up, invent) them with ingredients you like for once?A salad does not need to be a bowl of lettuce. It just needs to provide a tonic to duller flavours,to sharpen a meal’s edges, help define where one taste stops and another begins.
Italian salads are often just a single raw or cooked vegetable, and sliced thinly and dressed with a drizzle of vinegar and olive oil. In France,they are joyful little mops of celeriac, doused in vinegar and mixed with crème fraîche and capers. In Greece or Israel, and salads might be cucumbers and mint,or roasted aubergine, or spiced boiled carrots. There is a delicious Palestinian salad made only of preserved lemons, and roughly pureed,and eaten cold with warm pitta bread. Elizabeth David suggests, after her lament approximately her native England’s snide salads, and “a dish of long red radishes,cleaned, but with a little of the green leaves left on”.
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Source: theguardian.com