How to become a ‘salad freak’

Imagine a summer morning in Southern California. You rise with the sun in a palm-shaded bungalow and stroll to a nearby farmers market, where the tables spill over with heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn and cartons of juicy strawberries. Your canvas tote filled with the season’s bounty, you return to your sun-dappled kitchen to prepare a farm-to-table feast for all your friends while listening to your favorite vintage records. Sigh.

This is the dreamy lifestyle purveyed by Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession by Jess Damuck (Abrams, 2022). I’ve always aspired to be the kind of woman who can “just toss something together,” making a light, fresh, delicious dish with ease, rather than worrying that something will catch fire if I leave my post by the stove. Encouraged by the casual California lifestyle displayed in its pages — farmers market produce, sun-dappled kitchen and all — I thought Salad Freak might help me learn to bring easygoing elegance to my kitchen.

There turns out to be nothing casual about the recipes in this book. Damuck admits to making “three-hour salads” for her former boss Martha Stewart, referring to the time spent shopping and chopping for a single lunch. (You’ll notice that Damuck’s recipes do not include prep or cook times.) I never spent three hours on one of these salads, but I was also pre-screening for excessive fussiness: if Step One was something like “using a Y-peeler, create thin ribbons from an entire bunch of carrots and soak in an ice bath while you make scratch pesto,” I turned the page. “Plum, Tomato, Burrata, Chile and Cilantro” salad was lower-maintenance and a delicious side dish. “Crispy Chicken with Gingery Cabbage, Mandarins and Almonds” was a hit with
my husband, though next time I plan to grill rather than fry the chicken. “Simple Egg Salad with Lots of Dill” is a surprisingly fresh take on a classic, and a filling breakfast with toast and arugula.

Many recipes, regardless of how fussy the preparation, could only satisfy someone with one of those bootleg Ozempic prescriptions. For example, the “Raw Zucchini, Corn, Chile, Lime, Mint and More Lime” salad is introduced with a story about a barbecue Damuck threw after a weekend-long yoga retreat. She was so exhausted from meditating that she served nothing but this salad, salsa verde, and bread, and her guests apparently cheered rather than mutinied. (I liked the salad, alongside chipotle-grilled chicken thighs.)

Becoming a salad freak isn’t just time-consuming; it’s expensive! Only specialty grocery stores stock ingredients like burrata and three varieties of mandarin, none of which are sold by the pound in a net sack. Pantry staples Damuck insists should be splurged on include red wine vinegar, maple syrup, all nuts, all spices, and tuna (jar, not tin).

Though I’ll keep some of these salads in my back pocket for a summer potluck where I hope to impress, I may simply be too busy, too budget-conscious, and just too hungry to become a true “Salad Freak.”

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition.