Chicory
Arugula-Chicory Salad with Pine Nuts and Goat-Cheese Toasts
The contrast of textures and flavors—crunchy pine nuts, creamy goat cheese, acidic tomatoes, and spicy arugula—adds complexity to this simple salad. It makes a great side dish to steak or chicken or a light lunch for two.
Salad with Walnut-Mustard Dressing
This creamy dressing is also terrific over chilled steamed vegetables.
Frisée, Radicchio and Mixed Green Salad with Shrimp and Mushrooms
Tarragon brings its distinctive flavor to this salad. Serve it alongside the strata.
Pickled Beet and Endive Salad with Goat Cheese and Walnuts
By Charlie Trotter
Caviar Dream with Endive and Baby Potatoes
A creamy sauce and a trio of caviars are the "dream" of this party dish. Buy the quality and quantity of caviar that fit your budget.
Chef's Salad
The chef's salad is a familiar yet fading star in the salad world. In delicatessens, diners, and airport snack bars everywhere, we find its faithful components: lifeless leaves of iceberg lettuce, suspiciously blue-hued slices of hard-boiled egg, wedges of pallid tomato, and rubbery chunks of cheese, ham, and turkey. To top it all off (or perhaps sitting alongside): gloppy, high-calorie dressing.
But this still-beloved salad may have had a noble beginning. Though nobody has ever stepped forward to claim the title of the chef in "chef's salad," the dish has been attributed by some food historians to Louis Diat, chef of The Ritz-Carlton in New York City in the early 1940s. He paired watercress with halved hard-boiled eggs and julienne strips of smoked tongue, ham, and chicken. (The concept of the chef’s salad dates still earlier; one seventeenth-century English recipe for a "grand sallet" calls for lettuce, roast meat, and a slew of vegetables and fruits.)
No matter how the salad has evolved, its underlying virtue remains unchanged. This is a no-cook meal that satisfies our cravings for greens and protein. And, in these dog days of summer-when cooking is sometimes the last thing we'd like to do-a main-course salad is especially appealing.
In our updated take on the classic recipe, we used a selection of lettuces (early chef's salads were not always made with iceberg alone), and, in a twist on the norm, small but flavorful amounts of sugar-cured ham and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Feel free to improvise with ingredients depending on what looks good at your farmers market. Summer savory or dill can flavor the dressing in place of the mixed herbs, and many kinds of ham and cheese will work well.
Frisée, Escarole, and Endive Salad
When dressing a salad in the classic Italian style, each vinaigrette ingredient is tossed individually with the greens in a specific order, rather than being whisked together.
Active time: 20 min Start to finish: 20 min
Endive and Jícama Salad with Orange-Pine Nut Vinaigrette
Gorgonzola cheese adds great flavor to this southwestern winter salad.