Home delivery
Contact us
Your account

E-mail article     Print view

A Main Attraction

Light yet satisfying, steak salad hits the end-of-summer spot

PREV |  of  | NEXT

BARRY WONG / SPECIAL THE SEATTLE TIMES An American steakhouse standard used to be Tomato and Onion Salad. This salad brings the steak and salad together. Fresh lime juice and sweet Thai red chili sauce add zip to the light vinaigrette.

THE IMMORTAL M.F.K. Fisher may have been slightly out of step with most Americans when, in 1968, she wrote "The Cooking of Provincial France" as part of the Time-Life Foods of the World series. In those days, American salads had been relegated to little wooden bowls served off to one side of the large plate reserved for the main course, which, according to her, was almost always a steak. Fisher advocated a French approach — salad served on clean plates, or even "on the ones used for the main course if the flavors are congenial."

Salads have been served on plates large and small, with or without other courses, for as long as people have been writing down what they ate. And over the decades, certain styles of salad have come in and out of fashion, just like clothing or bedding plants.

Contemporary salads come in so many variations that choices are almost infinite. Consider artisanal blue cheese, toasted walnuts and red grapes on a bed of tender spinach. How about oranges and avocados layered over watercress, or roasted beets with crumbles of goat cheese on Belgian endive?

The once novel Caesar salad, so chic in our parents' day, has become a nearly ubiquitous slate on which all sorts of things are written. The most significant variation might be the grilled chicken Caesar; once dismissed as an aberration by Julia Child, who preferred her Caesar pure, it seems to be always and everywhere these days.

The trend for main dish salads might be traced to the Cobb salad, which originated at Robert Cobb's Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood in 1937. It may well have been the creation of executive chef Robert Kreis, but legend has it that Cobb himself came up with the combination of greens, avocado, cold chicken, bacon, hard-boiled eggs and crumbled blue cheese. Part of what makes this salad fun to serve and eat is the tradition of arranging the ingredients in neat stripes along a platter or a plate.

In the mid-20th century, salade niçoise took center stage. Once, in Nice, at a café just a stone's throw from the Mediterranean, I shared a plate of the classic salade niçoise with my wife. On a bed of cool and tender green leaves, warm yellow potatoes dressed in oil, slender green beans, red, red tomatoes and tiny fragrant black olives surrounded a mound of oily tuna. Like millions of other Americans, we were smitten.

Then came taco salad, which was all the rage in the 1980s and is still going strong. Basically a heap of shredded iceberg lettuce piled with all the elements of a taco, this salad takes as many forms as the Mexican snack for which it's named. Served in or out of a crispy fried tortilla bowl, it can be made with chicken, beef or beans and dressed with anything from salsa to ranch dressing.

Lately, Southeast Asian-inspired beef salads seem to be the "it" dish. Spicy beef on a bed of greens might reawaken our penchant for taco salads, but the trend is equally indebted to a generalized love affair with the flavors of that cuisine in whatever form they take. I'm not sure what M.F.K. Fisher would think of it, but something tells me she would like it. Certainly, she would find the flavors congenial.

Greg Atkinson is author of "Entertaining in the Northwest Style." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at studio@barrywongphoto.com.