Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In a large bowl, whisk together 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, the olive oil, salt and chives.
Drain the onions and pat them dry with paper towels. Add the onions to the dressing and
stir to coat well. Remove the onions with a slotted spoon, draining any excess dressing
back into the bowl, and arrange them on a platter in a broad layer.
Add the avocados to the leftover dressing and stir to coat well. Remove them with a slotted
spoon and arrange them in an oblong mound on top of the onions, centering the mound so
the onions show around the edge.
Add the shrimp to the leftover dressing. Add a squirt of lemon juice and a little more salt
to taste. Stir to coat well. Arrange the shrimp on top of the avocados and garnish with
snipped chives. Serve.
PLATTER SALADS
"Composed salad": the very name is enough to kill your appetite, evoking visions of
white-gloved matrons sitting around after bridge eating canned sliced peaches artfully
arranged over slivered iceberg lettuce and decorated with cream cheese rosettes. In the
minds of most people, composed salads are antiques from the old-fashioned school of
cooking that was concerned more with the way dishes looked than how they tasted. After
all, why arrange all those ingredients so carefully if you're just going to toss them together
at the table?
But let's not be too hasty to poke fun. There's nothing wrong with composed salads that
a bit of updating won't cure. Like much of classical cuisine, when composed salads are
stripped to their barest components, there is good, sensible food behind the stilted pret-
tiness. In fact, among better cooks, the decoration has never been the dish's main vir-
tue. In that bible of oldfashioned French cooking, the Larousse Gastronomique, the term
salades composees is translated as "combination salads" (as opposed to "simple salads"),
emphasizing the mix of raw and cooked ingredients rather than their artistic arrangement.
Escoffier went one step further, speaking out forcefully against the overdecoration of the
dish. "The increased appetizing look resulting therefrom is small compared with the loss
in the taste of the preparation," he wrote in The Escoffier Cookbook. "The simplest form
of serving is the best, and fancifulness should not be indulged in."
So forget about separating the meat, vegetables and greens into little decorative piles. Ar-
range them in a more modern, naturalistic way, and you have something delicious that is
also beautiful without being contrived. Even better, you have dinner. Because when you
get right down to it, a composed salad is the perfect meal for a hot summer night. Take a
