Heaven on a plate

For many years now, my idea of light, healthy and, most of all, interesting food has been a salad. Now I do not speak of the conventional salad that has a leaf or two mixed up with some other vegetables and a selection of cold cuts or anything as boring as that. What I mean is the really creative salad, with either just one or two ingredients or the whole shebang, occasionally with a crunchy bit or two added for fun rather than edibility (sometimes it could be fragments of the kitchen sink, since all of it and more go in). I am not sure I like fruit and veggies mixed in together, not unless the tastes and textures really work in tandem, but some of the more fun melanges of crisp and crunchy, soft and chewy, light and solid, sweet, bitter, acid and spicy.

Perhaps, for me, the worst salad ever but the most basic and elegant in a strange kind of way is the standard Indian ‘salaad’, ubiquitous at restaurants of the particularly Punjabi-Chinese-Continental ilk. It has slices of cucumber, tomato, onion and sometimes mooli, all nicely arranged on a dinner plate. Punctuating the display will be small slices of lemon, that you are supposed to squeeze on to the veggies after you have delicately transferred them to your plate and dusted them with salt and pepper. You eat them as a wonderfully persistently aromatic hors d’oeuvres (which I can never spell right without a little help from dictionary.com) or as a crunchy accompaniment to the rest of the meal. There is also the mixed version of that, commonly served in office canteens, which is mainly carrots, cucumber, tomato and onion, with a little cabbage and the occasional sliver of beetroot thrown in. It is served with a small spoon from a large bowl on the counter and is best eaten judiciously – all the constituents are guaranteed to produce amazing amounts of stomach acid or gas, especially when consumed in conjunction with the food itself.

The first time I made a salad was a leafless occasion. I had watched my mother make the usual potato salad and had watched enough television versions of it, along with various other recipes in various other kitchens. But I was feeling adventurous, so I added a little of this and a little of that and created a marvellously fragrant and – as it turned out, I must admit with some immodesty – delicious concoction. It had a base of potatoes, yes, but also incorporated peas, carrots, beans, onions and bits of leftover roast chicken and slivers of juicy pink ham, all bathed gently in an unctuous dressing that blended mayonnaise with yoghurt with grated cheese, garlic, kothmir, dill pickle, olives and mustard. There may have been some salt and pepper, too, I don’t remember. It went on the table redolent of herbs and spices and made us all reek rather of the garlic and onion for what felt like days afterwards.

From that, I graduated to macaroni salads, tuna salad, even coleslaw. But my favourite (at least in theory) was a salad I ate with a close friend that I have written about before, in a place called the Delhi Gymkhana. It was a French food festival and my friend, an elderly army man who had known my family since he and his brother and my father and his brother were in boarding school together, escorted me fondly to it. The food was nothing spectacular, a fairly decent stab at cuisine from that wicked, wicked country called France. But the labels with the large dishes of food were the ultimate delight for me. There was Wall-drop Salad, complete with its apples and walnuts. And for the rest of the meal there was Rose Marry Chicken, a whimsical take on modern taste in culinary matrimony, we giggled. And, of course, for dessert there was the ever-favourite Apple Tart, the ubiquitously army Bread-Butter Pudding and, much to my eternal amusement, Peach Cobbled with Plum Compost. When the wall dropped whatever it did drop, the shoe did too, but we were too overjoyed editorially to protest. It was probably the nicest meal I have had ever!