Sauce #102 | Rabbit Food

A brief ode to green salad

Folks, I haven’t done a great deal of cooking in the last couple of weeks. At least, not a great deal of domestic cooking - or at least, none of note.

There was a hastily cobbled together plate of sausage and beans after a game of Padel on Monday night. On the weekend I had some very good mutton chops from Swaledale. What else. Honestly I don’t remember. The week was subsumed by the spring tasting at Thirsk Lodge Barns. I think I’ve just about nailed the hash browns, which we serve as a canapé topped with steak tartare. This combination ought to be rolled out as a main course at home at some point. A recipe will follow in the coming weeks. I enjoy making hash browns. They’re a lazy man’s confit potatoes and every bit as delicious.

What I really want to talk about today is salads. I’ve had a couple in the last few months that have really made me re-evaluate what a salad should be. A green salad, I mean, at least principally, though we’ll get onto the crudité Niçoise salad I ate at Camille on Tuesday night.

The salad fixation began a while back when 10 Cases bossman Ian and I went to the French House one quiet January lunchtime and, full confession, I became a little choked up over the salad. We ordered it more out of curiosity than anything. “At £10 this better be a fucking good salad” I’d said to Ian. It was a fucking good salad. The care and attention and detail that had gone into it were truly astonishing. Beautiful leaves, carefully picked. Peeled and very thinly sliced, and very cold celery and cucumber. Diced shallot. Chives, perhaps. Certainly finely torn mint which gave everything an unexpected lift. A good dressing, obviously. We spent a long time planning a green salad championship which will never happen because, what a weird idea. But that’s how good the salad was. We were curious to see who else makes a truly outstanding green salad and to pit the best ones against each other.

They do a cracker at Camille in Borough Market. A great mound of good lettuce and bitter leaves finished with a generous avalanche of Spenwood, a vegetarian English pecorino-style cheese. Classy move. Which. again, you’d expect at £9. The knock-out, though, was the crudités niçoises which, like all the best dishes, was a simple idea executed with full commitment and consideration on every level - the very best raw vegetables (asparagus, artichoke, peas and so on) with your standard Niçoise bits (black olives, tomatoes, anchovies, boiled eggs, potatoes, leaves) and finally, in a stroke of brilliance, more of a caesar dressing than a classic vinaigrette. Perhaps the best dish I’ve had all year.

Relatively tedious and uninspiring chefs will say you need to ask a cook to make a piece of toast, or cook some eggs, to get a sense of whether they can cook or not. True, perhaps. But to get a sense of how a cook thinks about ingredients, builds flavour, manages balance and seasoning, and knows when to stop, get them to make a salad. Hopefully they whack some cheese on at the end.

Three recipes next week, promise. One will probably be a salad. Enjoy the sunshine, if you’re in the UK.