To make a salad cookbook, you take several handfuls of creative recipes, toss them with tips for salad-making success, then serve with glam shots of tomatoes, lettuce and backlit bottles of vinaigrette.
“Salmagundi: A Celebration of Salads from Around the World” delivers more than that, thanks to author Sally Butcher’s wit, the book’s 150 salads and the history and cultural lore seasoning its pages.
If your salad comfort zone begins at iceberg and stops at butter lettuce, with an occasional foray into kale territory, “Salmagundi” (Interlink Publishing, $35) may prove a challenge.
If, instead, you’re willing to stretch your culinary muscles and prowl a few groceries in search of less common ingredients (i.e., pork skin or halloumi), “Salmagundi” offers a fun read and creative inspiration. With her husband, Persepolis, Butcher runs a London shop focused on Persian fare. “Salmagundi” is her fourth book.
The title, writes Butcher in the book’s intro, “is a 17th century English expression denoting a salad dish comprising, well, everything.”
The nearest modern equivalent she suggests? Fiambre, a Guatemalan salad of 20-plus ingredients. Butcher has a recipe for that using most every vegetable grown on the planet plus several meats and cheeses. You’d expect nothing less from her.
Her book’s 14 chapters target a salad’s primary components, from herbs and leaves on through to those based on rice, peas and beans, grains and pasta, meats and more. “The Dressing Room” chapter coaches cooks through oils, vinegar and more; “The Prop Cupboard” tackles edible flowers, carved stuff, etc. She offers herb-growing tips and info on tubers (working with fresh turmeric, salsify, etc.).
The book is filled with intriguing recipes: Fried okra with harissa mayo. Warm eggplant with garlic yogurt and caramelized walnuts. Seared monkfish and celery with a Pernod dressing. Gado gado (Indonesian peanut salad). Herbed grapefruit salad with smoked salmon. Peach salad with chilled ginger cream dressing.
There are less exotic recipes as well: Her grandfather’s cole slaw, a salad Nicoise, a crab Louie.
And Butcher’s writing is liberally dressed with her sense of humor and lively approach to cooking. The serving size for her recipe for avocado shrimp jello salad (ingredients include lime jello, vodka, Tabasco and chives): “Klingon Party Food for 6.” And the first of her rules of urban foraging is this: “It’s not for you if you don’t like creep crawlies.”