Butter Leaf Salad, Shallot Vinaigrette, and Maldon
If there is any dish that could be served with every meal, every day, morning, noon, and night, it’s butter leaf lettuce salad. Eggs Benedict with butter leaf lettuce salad; cheeseburgers with butter leaf lettuce salad; pasta alla carbonara with butter leaf lettuce salad. Or, for a snack, just butter leaf lettuce salad. Its acidic elegance balances out the heartiness of any meal. The trick is the dressing. Making your own vinaigrette is among the biggest single improvements you can do in the kitchen—it becomes a distillation of your aesthetic defined by acid, oil, sweetness, and salt. Jennifer’s mastery of the vinaigrette has done more to promote the advancement of cuisine in our house than anything else: the shallots discover a plump, inner sweetness in the vinegar; the olive oil expresses its spicy-green spirit in response to the pepper; and the mustard emulsifies so that the dressing coats the lettuce in silkiness. Then the Maldon, strewn across the surface of the dressed salad—a glittering fencework of flakes perched along the crests and vales of lettuce—snaps like static electricity to stimulate the palate—a flash of pungency that illuminates everything so quickly and clearly that it is gone before you have time to fully comprehend what happened. This is Maldon’s raison d’etre: to reveal and amplify, then vanish, leaving you with only the desire for another bite.
Recipe information
Yield
serves 4
Ingredients
Shallot Vinaigrette
Preparation
Step 1
To make the vinaigrette, combine the sliced shallot and vinegar in a small cup. Set aside for at least 15 minutes or up to several hours. The longer the shallots soak in the vinegar, the more their natural sugars will dissolve in the liquid and the sweeter the vinaigrette will be.
Step 2
When you are ready to dress the salad, mix the mustard into the vinegar and add the oil a little at a time, whisking until the vinaigrette is smooth and lightly thickened. Season with the salt and pepper.
Step 3
As soon as the dressing is ready, put the lettuce leaves in a salad bowl. Add the dressing and toss to coat with wooden salad utensils or your hands. You are less likely to bruise the lettuce if you toss it with your hands.
Step 4
Serve on individual salad plates and season each salad with an additional pinch of salt, or allow each person to salt their own.
Variations
Step 5
If you have a shallow dish or plate of Himalayan pink salt (see page 163), add diced green apple, walnuts, and Roquefort to this salad and serve it on the salt plate to bring out an unexpected nutty sweetness. Substitute 1/2-inch chunks of cucumber, tomato, and avocado for the lettuce, and presto, you are eating a luscious summer salad of another stripe. Substitute Bibb or red leaf lettuce if you like.
