I know it’s fashionable and has been for a while to eat raw food, and I’m not fashionable at all, in fact I might even be described as unfashionable although I am always interested in new and different things. I really do like salad, all sorts of salad which obviously is all about uncooked vegetables… and I often think back to how it has evolved.
For some reason I think of going as a child to visit a family with similar aged children to us. I guess I might have been about six or seven. We sat round a big table with a white lacy tablecloth and there was tea for the adults in cups and saucers – no mugs then! Just to deviate, the first mugs I remember were at the holiday camp where we had Horlicks before bed – we only had cocoa at home so Horlicks seemed very exciting and exotic – and delicious!
Back to visiting our friends for tea. There was a plate of bread and butter, and another plate of sliced ham; there was a dish of hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters and jars of pickled onions and piccalilli. There was a beautiful glass bowl with patterns on the side and it was full of lettuce leaves and tomatoes – whole tomatoes, not in slices or quarters. There was a small bowl of cut mustard and cress, and another of radishes and a dish of sliced cucumber – which may have had malt vinegar on… I can’t be sure, but as I write that seems to come back to me. Malt vinegar also featured in a dish of sliced boiled beetroot. The dressing was Heinz salad cream… we knew no other!
My salads are very different now; lettuce isn’t always very popular, but I like all the different varieties – I once made lettuce soup and it had a subtle but distinct flavour. I think I would be the only one to eat it in our house so I probably won’t make it again. Watercress featured in our family salads, and I love its peppery flavour and I even once went on a watercress diet! Now when I have lettuce I tear it, I don’t have great big floppy whole leaves on my plate. As I’ve mentioned before, I add all sorts of different vegetables, and fruit, and nuts and seeds. I never have salad cream, I really don’t like it, so sometimes it’s mayonnaise, sometimes just oil and a little balsamic vinegar – poured separately, or hummus, tahini, or yoghurt… I use all sorts of things for my salads.
My latest discovery – and I have no idea why I never thought of it before, is raw beetroot. I love beetroot, but previously I always cooked it… why??? Now I grate it, slice it, dice it, chop it, it’s my new favourite thing!
If I could time-travel back to visit that family who put on such a nice spread (cakes and biscuits afterwards) they would be astounded and probably horrified at the idea of raw beetroot… bad enough unpickled… but raw???
PS The watercress diet didn’t work, and my featured image is of beetroot soup
Lois Elsden 