Salads then and now
This is a book on my shelf, from the eighties - from 1983 to be precise. I bought it because I was a great admirer of Beverley Sutherland Smith, at the time and indeed I still am, and I thought it would give me some good ideas for summer food, but disappointingly - to me anyway, it was all salads.
I am not a fan of salads. Mostly to me there is a lot of masticating of not much. It's sort of rabbit food. As a result I do not think I have cooked, if that's the word - assembled might be more appropriate - any of the recipes in this book.
However, we are on the verge of all the awful summer heat, and yet another aversion my husband has developed as the years pass is an aversion to me cooking anything at all on a hot day. So I thought I should look into salads again and perhaps make lots more. After all the Caesar Salad that I made fairly recently was a great success. Even I liked it. So I thought this book would be a good place to start.
And in a way it is, and in another, not, because one thing it did was show me the difference between food styling back then and food styling now. For example here are two egg salads - to be fair they are different in concept but still. On the left one of Beverley Sutherland Smith's - Tomato and egg salad with nasturtium leaves, and on the right - Donna Hay's Butter lettuce and egg salad with malt vinegar dressing. It's just eggs on lettuce and chives, dressed with 5 mashed cooked egg yolks, mixed with 1/2 cup mayonnaise, 2tbsp malt vinegar, 2 tbsp buttermilk, salt and pepper.
I'm not quite sure what make the one on the left look so old-fashioned. Maybe it's just the way it's photographed without the trendy rustic looking accompaniments in Donna Hay's version. But there's definitely a difference. Probably not so much in the ingredients but more in the way they are arranged.
For that's the thing with salads isn't it? Perhaps even more than other food they have to look attractive. Or am I kidding myself? Maybe these days all food has to look good. I certainly bang on enough about the beautiful presentation of cookery books.
“Every salad you serve is a picture you have painted, a sculpture you have modeled, a drama you have created.” Carol Truax, The art of salad making
Well I think that's probably a bit over the top. Indeed Jamie Oliver, another salad devotee tends to go for just throwing stuff on a plate and it will look beautiful - as here - a Warm bread salad of crispy pancetta, parmesan and poached egg. I suspect it probably took several people a long time to make it look just perfect though. Various people on the net have copied and reproduced this salad - here is one of them. Jamie doesn't have it on his website. At least the lady on the All Roads Lead to the Kitchen website acknowledges where it comes from. Some don't. And now that I look at these three pictures again I think the thing that makes the first one look old is the way the eggs are cut and presented. They are halved with a basil leaf on top. Donna Hay quarters hers - much more enticing somehow, and Jamie Oliver has the now very fashionable poached egg, oozing it's yolk picturesquely into the salad underneath.
"Presentation is of vital importance with a salad, since cold food doesn't offer much to our sense of smell, we must rely on a visually pleasing arrangement to excite our taste buds." Beverley Sutherland Smith
And presentation to her, back in the 80s includes things like serving her salad in a pineapple shell, which I don't think would happen now.
The other thing about salads, being mostly uncooked is that you have to have good ingredients. No leftover bendy cucumbers here.
"It may be possible with cooked food to sometimes disguise inferior ingredients with a rich sauce, a strong tasting stuffing or a medley of ingredients which can confuse the palate, but the standard of a salad is based without question on the quality of the raw produce." Beverley Sutherland Smith
The other difference over time is what goes into the salad and this process had begun even back in the eighties:
"Until some years ago salad in Australia meant a collection of ingredients which mostly consisted of lettuce, some processed cheese either grated or cut into strips, a piece of sliced tomato usually under-ripe and inevitably a thick piece of beetroot. A sad, miserable concoction.
If there is one particular dish which would indicate the changed sophistication of the Australian palate it is the vast and interesting collections of salads which are served now, whether for first courses, main dishes or as an accompaniment."
Beverley Sutherland Smith
Very true and I think it's probably the same in other countries in the western world - at least those without the historical culinary traditions of France, Italy and the rest. You can see this at the lowest level by the variety of vegetables in the fresh food section, the array of salad dressings, vinegars and oils in the supermarket aisles, and all those extra things like nuts, seeds, exotic cheeses and breads also found on your local supermarket shelf.
I'm hoping that there won't be so many super hot days this summer that we have to eat salad for our main dish that often. But there are lots to choose from. There are the traditional Caesar Salad, Salade Niçoise and Warm Honey Chicken salad for starters, and then there are sumptuous interesting ones like this from my Nigella book - Anglo-Asian Lamb Salad, which pretty much sums up what has happened to salad in the western world. I might try that next time I have to produce a salad meal. And look there is a video where you can watch the mildly irritating Nigella cook this salad - she's irritating - to me anyway, but the food is really good.
Tomorrow is really, really hot - over 40 but we shall be chickening out by going to see a movie and do a bit of shopping therapy in a shopping centre, with a cheap and cheerful meal out at Melissa's afterwards. And I'm not going to have salad, though David probably will even though they no longer do his favourite warm honey chicken salad.
