Salad

Insalata di Sedano, Avocado, e Peperone con Olive Nere I find the flavors and texture of this salad to be particularly agreeable immediately following a seafood course.

Editor's note: This recipe is from Brini Maxwell's Guide to Gracious Living. For Maxwell's tips on throwing a summer pool party, click here. What family reunion would be complete without potato salad? This is my mother's recipe. It's delicious — tasty and tangy, just as potato salad should be.

Food editor Ruth Cousineau learned this technique in Seville; it ensures the eggplant maintains its shape and flavor perfectly.

Combining sweet, sour, salty, and bitter ingredients with a tangy vinaigrette,this salad almost explodes with flavor.

It's easy to stereotype salad as summertime fare, but this dish proves otherwise. Shredded beef and warm potatoes pair up with a lively mustard vinaigrette to create this satisfying meal.

This tangy dressing really livens up a plate of crisp salad greens. It's also great on a baked potato or as a dip.

Salade de Laitue The word laitue comes from the Latin word for milk, from the milky juices some lettuces can exude. Hearty, buttery Bibb leaves are a good example of the rich, juicy quality lettuce can have. They're so big and rich, in fact, that this salad almost qualifies as a meal in itself. This salad is all about freshness. Use plenty of freshly picked fines herbes: parsley, chives, tarragon, and chervil; harder herbs, such as savory, rosemary, and marjoram, would be too strong. Finish it with a squeeze of lemon juice. Buy nice rounded, mature heads of Bibb lettuce, with good weight; these will have the greatest amount of tender yellow interior leaves. If the leaves have become at all soft and leathery, a rinse in cold water will refresh them.

This is our basic vinaigrette, three parts oil, one part acid, pared almost to its essentials—no shallots, no salt and pepper—so that it can be used almost like a sauce base. The mustard adds flavor and strengthens the emulsion. Any number of additional ingredients may be added to it, depending on how it's to be used. Most often it's used to dress greens that have been seasoned with salt and tossed with fresh herbs, as with the Bibb Lettuce Salad .

Using blood orange juice in the dressing means less oil is necessary, which lowers the fat in this dish. Mâche, sometimes called lamb's lettuce, can be found in four-ounce packages in the produce section of many supermarkets.

Mâche is sold in different ways — sometimes it comes in a package with soil plugs attached and sometimes you can find it loose, like mesclun. If you're buying it with plugs attached, you'll need 1 1/2 pounds; if you're buying it loose, you'll need 5 ounces.

If you're making the striped bass in agrodolce sauce as well as this salad, save 1/3 cup chopped fennel fronds for garnishing the fish.

To preserve their vibrant color and pure flavors, cook the greens just until they are slightly wilted. The ribs of the greens should retain some crispness.