Salad

This is best when you have freshly made sauerkraut—especially a whole head, which you can sometimes find at Eastern European specialty markets. There will, of course, be times when that’s impossible, and then you must turn to packaged sauerkraut. This is not a problem as long as you steer clear of the canned stuff and look for that packed in plastic bags, containing nothing but cabbage and salt. Serve this strong, tart salad with a hearty meat dish, like “Deviled” Pork Chops (page 362), Baeckoffe of Pork and Lamb (page 399), or Carbonnade (page 385).

Beet salads in general are wonderful, but this one is a refreshing change. For one thing, the beets are raw. For another, their sweetness is offset by the sharp taste of raw cabbage; it’s a fine if odd marriage. Think of it as Swedish coleslaw (like coleslaw, it can be made a few hours in advance). Whenever you peel beets—and especially when you’re grating them—be sure to wear an apron or clothing you don’t care about.

This is why people want to move to Italy: you can buy raw fresh artichoke hearts already trimmed (occasionally you can find these in this country’s best markets too, especially in California), and layer them with the best Parmesan and olive oil. The cheese and artichoke have some kind of symbiotic magic going on, making the whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Fantastic.

You might think Caesar Salad is American, but legend has it that it was invented in Tijuana in the 1920s by an Italian named Caesar Cardini, who originally called it “aviator’s salad” because so many of the U.S. Air Force pilots based in San Diego loved it. In any case, the secret to a great Caesar salad is making sure everything is as fresh as you can get it—this includes the eggs and lettuce—and the best quality possible: freshly grated (and real) Parmesan and good anchovies, packed in either salt or olive oil.

One of the most delicious salads, offered at many Paris bistros and throughout the countryside. Good with a ripe pear on the side or cut into cubes and added to the mix.

Simple, basic, and essential. You can always make a true Vinaigrette (page 600), but as is, this is the simplest green salad, as good for entertaining as it is for weeknights. Almost any greens are good with this dressing, from romaine, Boston, or iceberg lettuce to frisée or radicchio, but a mixture is best. The prepacked mesclun mixtures now sold in almost all supermarkets make it even easier.

In Western cooking, vinaigrette is the closest thing to an all-purpose sauce. I recommend making vinaigrette in a blender, where it becomes so stable that it can be prepared hours before it is needed. Once made, it can be used on everything from green salad to cold meat, vegetables, or fish dishes to anything that has been broiled or grilled, whether served hot or at room temperature. I well remember the first time I had good vinaigrette, and it was in France. It was so far and away the best salad dressing I’d ever tasted (and at this point I was twenty-six years old, so I’d tasted at least a few, though the vast majority had come out of bottles) that I had to ask the secret. The answer—now so obvious, then a revelation—was shallots. But you can use such a wide variety of flavors in vinaigrette (see the variations) that these days the standard French variety seems almost clichéd.

Farro is a wheatlike grain grown in central Italy (known as spelt here). Barley makes a good substitute; cook it the same way. Here it is combined with a simple pesto; it’s a lovely picnic or summer party side dish, with almost anything.

Like the Uncooked Tomato-Mustard Sauce on page 606, this is often used to lend flavor to the ultrabland bollito misto, boiled mixed meats. But it’s a perfect sauce for roasted or poached fish and can even be thinned with more olive oil to make a salad dressing.

Practically ubiquitous in Sweden and wonderful with cold vegetables, gravlax, cold meats, and sandwiches. You can leave it fairly thick and use it as a dip or thin it as much as you like to make it a little more saucy or even as thin as a salad dressing.

Neither mayonnaise nor guacamole, but something in between and, in some instances, better than either as a sandwich spread. Great, too, as a dip for cold shellfish. You can also thin it with heavy cream, sour cream, or yogurt and use it as a salad dressing (think of it as real Green Goddess). Make it spicy or not, as you like; I’ve had it both ways.

I have been making this winter fruit salad from the time I first started looking at cookbooks and well remember the original Claudia Roden recipe (in her wonderful classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food). My version, honed by experience and travel, is a little different. If you use water, you will probably need to add a bit of sugar; start with 1/2 cup and see how that tastes. This recipe produces a lovely syrup of its own, but you can serve it with yogurt or fresh or sour cream if you like. If you’re in a hurry, you may cook the mixture, gently, until the fruit softens. The texture will be mushier, the fruits less distinctive, but the taste will still be great.

In America, commonplace coleslaw is made from green cabbage, but I do see shreds of red cabbage tossed into a mixed salad every now and then. When I was a child in northern Italy, we ate a lot of the cabbage family, from regular cabbage to Savoy cabbage to black kale. We ate red cabbage braised next to a roast, but we also made a lot of differently dressed salads with it. The secret—and the work—was in slicing the cabbage thin. But given today’s food processors and all their different attachments, and the reasonable prices of mandoline slicers, this salad is a cinch to make. You can even slice the cabbage a few hours in advance; just remember to toss it with some vinegar as soon as you slice it to keep its color bright.

The harmony of this salad is that both the radicchio and the endive are from the chicory family, sweet and slightly bitter at the same time.