no. 88: nothing but a flood of green

It has been a damn fine salad season already, and it’s only May. That fact makes the summer stretch ahead like a school holiday, endless with the promise of wonder and delight. 

There are only two kinds of salad in this household: salad that’s dinner, and salad that’s not dinner. Either can appear at lunchtime, but the spirit of dinner is important. Lunch salads conjure up the desk and the office and midtown at noon, all manner of undelicious associations. You do not want to wind up with office pellets, as virtuous and functional and tasty as the compostable bowl they come in.

You want to wind up with something like this: 

High tunnel romaine, a glacée of asparagus and spring onions, grilled artichokes from a jar, the end of an American sheep’s cheese, a fragment of frittata, and Borlotti beans. 

The jar of artichokes is from Trader Joe’s. They’re a tad more leached of flavor than the fancy ones that are thrice the price, but they’re much more than one-third as good. We buy them because spring tastes like artichokes and Massachusetts has none – but I’m encouraged by the fact that they apparently grow in English gardens. 

We almost always have some cooked beans in the fridge, waiting in their broth like rocks in a plunge pool. Spike the broth with vinegar, and over good leaves, they’re almost a salad on their own. 

Nearly monochrome, like a walk in the park in high summer. Nothing but a flood of green, a quantity of green that vibrates, hinting at all the wavelengths we cannot see. Another bag of the high tunnel Romaine, more artichokes from the jar, French lentil salad. The glacée was more complicated, this time, with fiddleheads and ramps, and radishes shaved into it while it was still warm. Two sauces, one of spinach, ramps, and feta; the other of nettles. 

These are all odds and ends, leftovers and preserves made in factories, not exactly “mise en place.” But D brings them together with sprezzatura, which is why she makes the salads. You basically want vegetables upon vegetables upon vegetables, but in a composition, not a pile. Acid brings things together, but so does creaminess – used judiciously, or you wind up with something from the 50s, green and in a mask. 

The key, I think, is that each element makes sense on its own. You could separate these, like a fairytale princess sorting salt from sugar, and eat the components one after another, and not be sad – though I think you’d still be happier eating them together. Take a desk salad apart, and at some point you’re ruminating your way through raw cabbage and shredded carrots, dry and browning. 

I fantasize about a restaurant that serves nothing but salad like this, ideally located two blocks from me. It’s such a perfect way to eat, yet it feels like such an impossible premise for a restaurant. 

This isn’t because a stupendous salad is hard to make. Salad was actually the first thing I learned to make in a restaurant kitchen, because, my chef said, it takes no skill, only care and attention. All the magic in a salad lies in picking the ingredients, and lavishing them with time and care. In Singapore we didn't have the luxury of picking our ingredients, so all that was left was the lavishing. If you do that, if you pick out the brown bits and refresh your leaves in cold water, and take time with your knifework, and if you can make a simple vinaigrette, you can get to something beautiful like this:

I didn’t make that, but it’s the best restaurant salad I’ve had in recent memory, at an exquisitely competent, thoroughly predictable restaurant in NYC with bulletproof atmosphere. I mean look at that salad. It was crunchy, vivacious, dressed for the runway. The chives credit the cook. I ate my way to the bottom and didn’t find a bruised leaf or browned stem in the haystack. 

I also got bored a third of the way through. That salad is totally well behaved, perfect as a prefect in prep school. It’s not about to get up and dance on tables or take over dinner, and it absolutely will not upstage whatever protein is on the table with it. And this, really, is how most restaurant salads work – they’re sideshows, competent but obligatory, and the feeling of obligation always comes through. The salad is on the menu because there has to be a salad on the menu. 

And if that salad is unruly, like this one:¹

What do you tell people? 

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Some links, carefully picked, dressed and tossed together:

Three food-related substacks I’ve been enjoying, and recommend highly. 

A Private Chef, by Will Cooper – Cooper is a sensuous cook, and writes about cooking with precise, economical poetry. I suspect he’s here for some of the same reasons I am. 

Shelf Offering, by Apoorva Sripathi – I’m not quite sure what to say about Shelf Offering, but then again I think most people aren’t quite sure what to say about Let Them Eat Cake. Sripathi writes less about food and more around it, and bounces from one perspective to another with an abandon that seems the only appropriate response to the absurd complication of the world around us. She writes both about delivery workers in India and paintings of a mound of butter. If you’re reading this, I suspect you’ll enjoy her work. 

The Art of Eating, by Ed Behr (once again) – The Art of Eating is both an encyclopedia of food and a history of the media ecosystem of the last 40 years. A long time ago, it was a newsletter pasted up and photocopied and mailed out each quarter, and was basically all the work of one curious and determined eater. It grew into a magazine, then went online, then stopped being offline, and now it’s once again being distributed by the internet equivalent of a photocopier and written entirely by Ed, who through all of this has continued to turn out the most thoroughly researched food writing on the internet, or possibly anywhere else.  

All three are mostly paywalled – a step I’m increasingly thinking of taking here. I’ll ask, as I periodically do: are there things you’d like to read about? More on restaurant life? Discussions of wine? Rants about kitchen tools?

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And more popups:

At Lamplighter on Broadway again, this coming Thursday, 6 June. You can also track all these over on my private cheffin’ website – or book a dinner.

This was the chye tau kueh from last time. 

This time, there will be fried chee cheong fun, of one school or another, I haven’t quite decided which. There will be lou bak. And quite possibly, there will be adventures in otak. 

The tok panjang popup at Formaggio has been rescheduled to Saturday, 27 July – there are a couple of seats left, which you can book here. 

1. I’m afraid I’m cheating a little here – this was from last June, when zucchini had started to appear.