There’s no time quite like the summer – a season that begs to be enjoyed with a Zen-like presence of mind – to get into all the things you don’t like about yourself. It comes out with the sun; a personal cumulus of worries about things like haircuts or the fact that, once again, you don’t have a wearable summer shoe. This is usually the time when I try to rebrand as a “salad person”. This isn’t a health thing, to be clear, it’s more a matter of Fomo. It happens when, on those lucid summer afternoons, I see greengrocers’ stalls with unusually weighty tomatoes. I hear talk of things like panzanella. There are people eating an immaculately composed Waldorf salad not as a preface to real food, but as a meal in itself. This is when I start trying to improve myself.
I am not predisposed to be a salad person. My cooking instincts lead me to stews and braises and soups – things that meld and mutate, things that actually cook. I could probably go years without it ever occurring to me to make a salad for dinner, but in my defence, I come from a line of non-salad people. Sometimes, my family would put a bowl of iceberg lettuce on the table, but their heart was never really in it; I don’t think it even occurred to anyone to dress it.
