Salad
Salads raw and cooked, dressed just before serving or left to sit. A dressing is a balance of salt, acid, sweetness and fat, and when it goes on changes the texture of what it dresses. Basics to read first: Balancing Flavour: Salt, Acid, Sweet, Fat, Heat
Esqueixada (Hand-Torn Raw Salt Cod Salad)
A Catalan salt cod salad. Desalted cod is never heated: it is torn into shreds by hand and dressed with tomato, onion, olive oil and vinegar. The name comes from the Catalan verb for tearing, and the cod never meets a knife.
Coronation Chicken (Poached Chicken in Curried Mayonnaise with Apricot)
A cold chicken salad created for the banquet at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Chicken is poached gently in water with white wine and cooled; curry powder is cooked once in a little oil and cooled; that base goes into mayonnaise and cream with an apricot purée for sweetness. The spice meets heat only in that one step, because mayonnaise is cold fat that can never cook it afterwards — so it is cooked apart, and everything is cold before it is combined.
Urap (Blanched Vegetables in Spiced Grated Coconut)
A Javanese vegetable salad: blanched or steamed vegetables tossed through seasoned grated coconut. Indonesian cooking usually presses the coconut for its milk and then spends the recipe managing the fat that comes out of it. Urap presses nothing. The grated flesh is mixed raw with a pounded paste of chilli, garlic, galangal and lime leaf, steamed briefly, and turned through the vegetables as a coating rather than a liquid.
Kısır (Bulgur Salad Worked with Pepper Paste)
A Turkish salad and meze: fine bulgur worked by hand with tomato and pepper paste and olive oil until it takes the colour, then mixed with parsley, spring onion, cucumber and pomegranate molasses and served at room temperature. Bulgur is wheat that has already been boiled, dried and cracked, so it is rehydrated rather than cooked — and here it gets only as much water as it can take up, so that the paste fills the rest.
Taramosalata (Cured Roe Whipped with Oil and Bread)
A Greek meze: salt-cured fish roe beaten with soaked bread, olive oil and lemon into a pale emulsion. It is a mayonnaise built in the opposite order — the emulsifier has already been cured for weeks, so the seasoning arrives before the cook does and the adjustment is made by diluting rather than by salting. Traditionally eaten on Clean Monday, the first day of the Orthodox Lent.
Nam Khao (Crispy Rice Salad with Fermented Pork)
The Lao salad in which cooked rice is mixed with curry paste and egg, packed into balls, deep fried, and then broken up by hand into fermented pork and herbs. An arancino is fried so that its shell will hold the inside in; this is fried in order to be broken. A ball has the least surface for its volume and frying only ever reaches the surface, so a whole one is a single thin crust around plain rice. Crushing it turns that one crust into dozens of crisp shards and opens all of the soft rice inside to the dressing.
Pikliz (Pickled Cabbage and Scotch Bonnet Relish)
Haiti's pickle of cabbage and carrot held in vinegar with scotch bonnet chillies. Capsaicin dissolves in fat, not water, so in a vinegar with almost no fat it moves across very slowly. A jar made yesterday is mild and a month-old jar is fierce, and the liquid itself becomes a hot sauce spooned over rice.
Lahpet Thoke (Fermented Tea Leaf Salad)
One of Myanmar's national dishes: a salad of fermented tea leaves, eaten rather than brewed. Raw tea leaf is too astringent to eat. Steamed leaves are pressed under a heavy weight with no brine, and after months their own juice has turned the astringency into sourness and savour. The crunchy extras are structure.
Yam Wun Sen (Cold Glass Noodle Salad)
A Thai salad of boiled and cooled glass noodles dressed with lime and fish sauce. Mung bean starch is over thirty per cent amylose, roughly double rice, and amylose recrystallises as it cools, which is what hardens a rice cake. Here that is the point: the noodle firms up as it cools instead of going soft.
Olivier Salad (Diced Potato, Egg and Pickle Bound with Mayonnaise)
Russia’s salad, and compulsory on a New Year table: potato, egg, pickled cucumber, peas and ham all cut to the same small dice and bound with mayonnaise. Temperature is the whole thing. Mayonnaise is a finished emulsion, and warm food breaks it from the outside — the fat softens and coalesces while steam condenses into it and thins it. So everything goes in completely cold and dry, which is the exact opposite of the rule for a German potato salad.
Pai Huang Gua (Smashed Cucumber Salad)
A Chinese cold dish in which the cucumber is smashed rather than sliced — the name means "beaten cucumber". A fracture runs along the cell walls and leaves a torn, irregular face, unlike the flat plane a knife makes, so there is far more surface and the inside is open. That is why the dressing goes in instead of sliding off. The garlic is the same story: allicin, the sharp smell of raw garlic, is not sitting inside an intact clove — it is manufactured the moment the cells break.
Salade niçoise (Composed Tuna and Egg Salad)
A salad from Nice: tuna, anchovy, boiled egg, tomato and olives laid out in separate groups on the plate. What matters here is not the ingredients but that it is not mixed. Tossed together, the tuna and egg break down into a grey paste and the tomatoes weep. Dressing each element and putting it in its own place is what a composed salad means, and this is the standard example.
Carottes Râpées (Grated Carrot Salad)
The default French salad: carrot cut fine and dressed in a mustard vinaigrette. Four ingredients look like nothing to get wrong, but an unemulsified dressing splits, the oil and vinegar slide off the carrot, and all of it pools in the bottom of the bowl. And unlike almost any other salad, this one is better half an hour after it is made than straight away.
Laap (Minced Meat Salad with Toasted Rice)
Laos's national dish: minced meat cooked without liquid, dressed with lime, fish sauce and herbs, and bound with toasted ground sticky rice. Without the toasted rice — khao khua — it is not laap, and the dressing and herbs go in only after the pan is off the heat.
Shopska Salad (Tomato Salad with Grated Cheese)
Bulgaria's signature salad: roasted red pepper, tomato and cucumber dressed with sunflower oil and vinegar, then buried under grated white cheese until the vegetables disappear. Roasting the peppers and piling the cheese on top rather than mixing it in are what make it shopska.
Fattoush
A Levantine salad of crisp toasted pita and crunchy vegetables tossed in a tangy sumac dressing. Loaded with cucumber, tomato, radish, and herbs, it is bright and fresh — a Mediterranean healthy classic that puts leftover bread to good use.
Som Tam (Green Papaya Salad)
Thailand's iconic salad: shredded green papaya pounded in a mortar with lime, fish sauce, palm sugar, and chili. Sour, spicy, salty, and sweet all at once, with crunchy papaya and toasty peanuts — and no cooking required.
Gado-Gado (Salad with Peanut Sauce)
Blanched vegetables, potato, boiled egg, and tofu on one plate under a generous pour of sweet-savory-spicy peanut sauce — Indonesia's beloved salad. Filling on its own, with kecap-manis peanut sauce tying every element together.
Coleslaw
An American salad of finely shredded cabbage and carrot in a creamy mayo-vinegar dressing. A crisp, no-cook side that's a must with burgers, BBQ, and fried chicken.
Tabbouleh (Parsley Salad)
A Lebanese herb salad of chopped parsley with bulgur, tomato, and mint, dressed in lemon and olive oil. A bright, healthy no-cook dish that pairs perfectly with mezze like hummus and falafel.
Caprese (Insalata Caprese)
An Italian salad from the island of Capri — slices of tomato, fresh mozzarella, and basil drizzled with just olive oil and salt. Its red, white, and green echo the Italian flag. With good ingredients it's a few cuts away from done — the easiest of starters.
Greek Salad (Horiatiki)
The traditional Greek salad (horiatiki) — ripe tomato, cucumber, red onion, and olives topped with a slab of feta, drizzled with olive oil and plenty of oregano. No lettuce; simple ingredients, Mediterranean at its best.
Caesar Salad
Crisp romaine tossed in a rich anchovy-garlic-Parmigiano dressing and piled with crunchy croutons and cheese. A world-loved classic, born in Tijuana, Mexico in 1924.