Salads: the times they are a-changing

I think it would be true to say that salads in this country were not all they should have been for a very long time; largely, I suspect, for the same reason our vegetable cooking lacked imagination: namely that our meat and fish were so good and plentiful that any other additions to the table took second place. Over a hundred years ago, a Victorian food writer described our lack of skill with salads as ‘a defect in our national character.’ He put it down to our obsession with pickles, and I think he had a point. Perhaps our delicious chutneys and pickles are to blame for that all-too-familiar sight: wet lettuce leaves, tomato quarters and perhaps a radish presented alone and undressed, with only a bottle of the dreaded factory-made salad cream for company.

Well, times have changed and so have salads. They have been enlivened by the growth of foreign travel and a wider knowledge of and interest in good food. Even stubborn grandmothers who swear they couldn’t eat anything ‘oily’ will enjoy a really well-dressed salad (provided you don’t tell them about the oil!).