When Shakespeare coined the phrase “salad days”, he was referring to a state of youthful inexperience. But at 41, and midway through the hottest summer on record, I can safely say my own salad days – these weeks of endless salad-eating – are the result of experience. As my organs segue into their fifth decade, I need more than rosé and a bag of Tyrrells for dinner. (Although if you’re interested, I’m a salt-and-vinegar Furrows person and my favourite rosé – Catalan producer Can Sumoi’s La Rosa – is on offer.)
I’m not only eating salad, of course, but assemblies of raw ingredients are an obvious choice if you’re looking for lo-fi meals that involve more interaction with the fridge than the oven. I like Tom Hunt’s rubric for a fridge-raid dinner salad, which – rather than sending you out for ingredients and sweat patches – uses whatever you have on hand. And Meera Sodha’s no-cook salad of tomatoes, chickpeas and rose harissa delivers fibre and flavour without so much as a struck match. And then there is Feast’s archive of recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi, which boasts doozies such as his tomatoes with mango-miso dressing and this courgette and cantaloupe salad. Ottolenghi’s lime and poppyseed slaw with curry leaf oil, meanwhile, has accompanied almost every barbecue or “family-style” spread – the citrus juice softens and “cooks” shredded cabbage, carrot and onions into submission, and don’t even get me started on its maple-turmeric cashews. The whole lot cries out for a beer – preferably Table Beer by the Bermondsey brewery the Kernel, a pale ale that is big on hops and low on booze (variable, but about 3%).
