There is a necessary something about the salads of winter that makes them equally (yet differently) important as those of summer, as though mind and body crave freshness when the sky is grey and the crows are gathering, some greenery to balance all that comfort and warmth. The vegetables available in the cool months are more substantial, the leaves requiring finer shredding and more careful selection with an eye to tenderness than their fragile warmer weather counterparts. I like the salads of my winters very much; a box grater becomes the best of kitchen tools.
Viana La Place includes a recipe in each of her books by a marvellous woman called Simonetta, a chic Parisian fashionista from the 60's who famously wrote a book titled A Snob In The Kitchen in 1967. The recipe La Place chose from that book for her own Unplugged Kitchen is Salade Fatiguée, described thus: "A salad must be fatigué, "tired" to be good; it must be mixed, beaten, and drunk with its dressing."
I don't follow recipes much these days and 'though keen, come summer, to try bundling a cos lettuce into a tea towel and thwacking the bejesus out of it before leaving it to soak for an hour or so, it's the drunk with its dressing idea, i.e. marinated for some time, that makes winter salads among the best I make. Above was duck confit, torn with care and tossed with grated beetroot, shredded kale, leftover roast potatoes, walnuts, crumbled from on high, and lots of pickled ginger. Dressed in a sesame oil/rice wine vinegar/brown sugar/fish sauce/tamari combination for about an hour before we ate. All the better for being drunken and fatigué. It's an especially useful tip if you are the kind of cook who likes to do a bit now, a bit tomorrow and a bit later on.
What I like best about this salad is that is one of those magical, improvised,one off dishes that you can never really recreate because you never again have exactly the same ingredients on hand.
Posted by: Elizabeth | July 29, 2014 at 04:10 PM