Salad

We serve this salad with most of our seafood dishes at the restaurant. It’s also quite good at an outdoor fish fry.

This is my son Jamie’s recipe. It’s the best! For a little variation, try adding walnuts and canned mandarin oranges or grapes for a Hawaiian taste.

This also makes a wonderful dressing for salads.

If you have leftover poached chicken, the moist meat makes a wonderful warm salad, with raisins and pine nuts and a lively, sweet dressing (similar to the Cooked Carrot Salad with Pine Nuts and Golden Raisins, page 45). Three cups of dressed chicken would serve 3 or 4.

It is so simple to transform a hard, homely celery root into a lovely salad with delicate taste and texture. Just drop the big root—a softball-sized unpeeled round—into a big pot of water, and let it cook for an hour or more. This technique retains and mellows the root’s wonderful flavor, and makes it easy to peel and cut it up too. Dress this simply, or take the salad in a different direction (see variations).

At my grandma’s house, we used to have this kind of salad many a time, with a slice of homemade bread and some good cheese, for supper.

Raw spinach salad can be delicious, but, in my opinion, a brief cooking—really just a dip in boiling water—brings out the vegetable’s best qualities. Use really young, tender spinach for this salad. It’s easy to find baby spinach in plastic packs these days, but whenever you can—especially in springtime—buy clusters of tender leaves with tiny reddish stems joined at the roots, as they were plucked from the earth. Trim only the hairy tip of the roots, and cook the leaves and stems still together. Make sure you wash them several times, since dirt lodges between the stems.

Carrots are an unappreciated standby. We tend to use them for everything but rarely highlight them. This dish brings out their sparkle.

This beautiful salad really depends on good ingredients: small firm beets with fresh unblemished greens still attached; a crisp tart apple or perhaps ripe fresh peaches or Black Mission figs; and aged goat cheese with a crumbly consistency. Roasting the beets to intensify the sweetness is also a key to the best salad.

Celery is often underappreciated as a principal salad ingredient. The inner stalks of the head have a wonderful freshness, flavor, and delicacy when thinly sliced. Here I’ve paired them with fresh baby artichoke slices in a salad with lots of bright, subtle flavors and all kinds of crunch. Shards of hard cheese—either Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano—lend even more complexity to the mix. Use only firm and very small artichokes for this: they should feel tight and almost squeak when you squeeze them, and they should have no choke.

Serve this colorful and delicious salad as a first course by itself, with other antipasti, or with grilled foods. You can use this low-fat method of preparing eggplant in other dishes too. I top it with shavings of ricotta salata (ricotta that has been salted and dried in a small round cheese form for about 4 weeks).

This is a great spring salad with two long, lovely green vegetables that have a real affinity for each other (try the Asparagus, Green Pea, and Scallion Sauce for pasta in chapter 3). It is delicious as an antipasto or a first course, or as a side dish to grilled meat and fish. You can serve this salad chilled, but I like it at room temperature. If you haven’t poached scallions before, be sure to note how nicely it brings out the flavors in a mellow way. And here’s a thrifty cooking tip: scallion trimmings are some of the most useful scraps in the kitchen. A handful of leaves and the root ends can make an instant broth, as a substitute for stock—see my recipe for Simple Vegetable Broth, page 288.

This is a special salad worthy of your homemade tonno sott’olio. You blanch the tomatoes and scallions, and briefly sauté the red onion to mellow pungency and soften textures. The salad needs a good hour of marinating to let the sweet and savory flavors mingle. Incidentally, leftovers make great juicy sandwiches. I recommend white balsamic vinegar here, to wilt the red onion and dress the salad. White balsamic is not a traditional product, but it comes from Modena, like any decent balsamic, and it has a clean taste and a light color that don’t muddy dishes the way dark balsamic can. If you can’t find it, use regular wine vinegar. You may also use top-quality canned tuna in this salad, but drain and discard the packing oil and substitute fresh extra-virgin olive oil in the dressing and sauté.

This recipe is much like the wonderful salad I had at Manfredi’s house. In Palermo, as I mentioned earlier, the insalata cruda e cotta that you can buy at the markets will vary with the season. In America, we can enjoy that same variety, so do not feel confined by these ingredients: use other greens, such as escarole, mesclun, and frisée, together with cooked vegetables such as roasted squash, boiled leeks, boiled beets—anything else you have on hand or enjoy.

In Sicily, citrus fruits (agrumi) are enjoyed as a savory as well as a sweet, usually served between courses or at the end of a meal. A salad—called pirettu—is made from thick-skinned citrons (cedri). The green rind is peeled off, the center pulp is discarded, and the pith is sliced and dressed with salt, pepper, oil, and a pinch of sugar. Since fresh citrons are hard to find in America, here’s another citrus salad popular in Sicily, especially in the winter months, when oranges are at their best. Customarily it is made with blood oranges—sanguine or tarocchi—and that’s the way I like it best, though any small, juicy oranges will be delicious. Serve this in the Sicilian style, laying the rounds of orange and rings of red onion artfully on a platter with the dressing drizzled over, rather than tossing everything together. It is great as an appetizer, a refreshing end-of-the-meal salad, or an accompaniment to boiled or grilled meats.

The following is a simple recipe that will give you all the sensations of fresh fennel as the vendor would have it.