Best dressed meal
For Italians, dressing a salad is as simple as breathing: you season it, drizzle oil and vinegar or lemon juice over it, toss it and … ecco!
The French kick off with a vinaigrette. Apparently it takes a spendthrift with the oil, a miser with the vinegar, a sage with the salt and a madman to mix everything together for the ideal salade verte. What could be easier?
So why is it that able chefs botch such a basic technique?
There's a two-fold answer. First, making a salad is un-British, not part of our culture. In the Middle Ages, sallet was a mixture of wild and cultivated herbiage doused in vinegar, something eaten occasionally. Going forward to the era of Roundheads and Cavaliers, salmagundy contained a mixture of cold meat and raw and cooked vegetables eaten as a special dish, which leads to the second reason.
There has never been a culture of eating salad as a part of the daily diet. However, over the past 15 years, salads and their dressings have undergone riotous change.
Every season brings its crop of new leaves, new herbs. And keeping pace with the greenery come flavoured vinegars and estate-bottled oils. In a competent, confident chef's hands, these may prove a stimulus to his or her creative instincts. For the wannabe, they offer a licence to concoct an endless stream of flavour clashes.
As if the Latin flavours weren't enough, chefs have also started to pull new combinations from the Pacific Rim hat. Lime or kalamansi juice and tamarind replace lemon or vinegar. Palm sugar, shrimp paste, nam pla, ginger and coconut milk open new vistas for taste buds.
In addition, cooks can play "aromatherapy games" with sets of highly priced essential oils: anything from truffle or lobster to rosemary, cinnamon and clove. The fashionable alternative is to devise one's own: beetroot-flavoured oil, dill oil or roasted scallop coral oil.
Thus, so many possibilities for both inventiveness and cock-up. Someone of the calibre of two-star French chef Michel Bras can get away with infusing flowers of St John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) to extract a clear, red, aromatic oil. Three-star culinary hero Marc Veyrat's vegetable vinaigrette (1 part olive oil, 3 parts groundnut oil, 1 part red wine vinegar, 1 part white wine vinegar, 4 parts vegetable stock, seasoning and cubed sugar rubbed on orange peel) works, as much as anything, because the flavour of the bouillon des légumes, which includes white wine, is so fresh and clean tasting.
It's not just that dressings themselves are special, but their creators know exactly how to dose them and what to pair them with so that they have the greatest impact.
At Chewton Glen, New Milton, Hampshire, chef Pierre Chevillard keeps things clean and simple. "The ideal thing", he says, "is to make the vinaigrette half an hour before you dress the salad."
Waiters in the restaurant who dress and toss salads in front of customers use a classic 3 parts groundnut oil to 1 part red wine vinegar, salt and pepper: nothing else, no Dijon mustard, no shallots.
He warns that if you prepare a dressing containing these, onion or garlic, the flavour will change from day to day. At home, a French family makes vinaigrette with shallots just before a meal. It isn't used as a store sauce. Flavour stays fresh.
For a tossed green salad, he prefers not to emulsify the oil and vinegar, because it doesn't coat the leaves lightly and evenly. But for asparagus, artichokes or leeks, whizzing the mixture in the blender can be helpful. He remembers that, early in his career, he worked for a chef who added raw egg white to a dressing to give it more body.
On the other hand, there is also a case for lengthening a dressing with water if its flavour is right, but the texture too thick.
