Salad Cookbook? What's Your Favorite?

[fooey]

I have a lot of cookbooks with salad chapters, but none that are dedicated solely to salads. I'm sure they exist.

Please recommend your favorite!

[Darienne]

I have a lot of cookbooks with salad chapters, but none that are dedicated solely to salads. I'm sure they exist.

Please recommend your favorite!

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I have no salad cookbooks. Once I found a lovely salad cookbook at Value Village but the photos in it were SO beautiful that I gave it to an artist friend who fell in love with it.

This is a vital topic to me as we eat salad, and salad only, every second night.

* keep weight down

* eat enough raw

* eat lightly at dinner time (heavy at breakfast, medium at lunch, light at dinner)

I loathe pasta salads (so far). Our salads are mostly greens...but they are a tad repetitive.

So I'll watch this thread with interest!!! Thank you fooey for starting it.

[Jaymes]

My favorite salad book of all is a vintage cookbook I got several decades ago. It's from the Recipes on Parade series of recipe books from military wives.

Recipes on Parade: Salads & Appetizers

You'll have to keep an eye out for it at used bookstores and flea markets and garage sales.

Here's another good one that's probably easier to find: Williams Sonoma - Salad

Edited August 16, 2009 by Jaymes (log)

[JAZ]

Lettuce in Your Kitchen by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby is mostly "main dish" salads, but many of them can be altered to work as side dishes as well. I've made several of their recipes, but mostly use the book for ideas for ingredient combinations and dressings. I highly recommend it.

[Darienne]

Lettuce in Your Kitchen by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby is mostly "main dish" salads, but many of them can be altered to work as side dishes as well. I've made several of their recipes, but mostly use the book for ideas for ingredient combinations and dressings. I highly recommend it.

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This sounds like the cookbook for me. Two reviews said that the writer had borrowed the book first from the library and then just had to have it. My modus operandi. Keeps me from making hasty choices and then finding out that my purchase was ill advised. Thanks. JAZ

[Jaymes]

I do not have this one: Simply Salads by Jennifer Chandler, but it's on my wish list, thanks to a friend that has it and thinks it's terrific.

[Rover]

I have the following:

. Chef's Salad - Bill Jones

. The Salad Book - Claire Connery

. Christopher Idone's The Salad Days

. Great Greens - Georgeanne Brennan

. Greens - a Country Garden Cookbook - Sibella Kraus

I didn't realize I had quite this selection, but they're all pretty good with very little duplication. My personal favourite main course salad is Salade Nicoise ... naturally from Julia.

Rover

[skipper10]

I have a lot of cookbooks with salad chapters, but none that are dedicated solely to salads. I'm sure they exist.

Please recommend your favorite!

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"Salad Days" by Marcel Desaulniers (seemed revolutionary to me when it first came out,) I bought it in hopes that it would have, what seemed at the time, Trellis's amazing tuna salad recipe which they used to make without mayo, but with walnut oil vinaigrette, walnuts, grapes and other things not usually associated with tuna salads in those days. I still peruse it every once in a while.)

"the well-dressed salad" by Jennifer Joyce, current favorite.

[Lapin d'Argent]

Lettuce in Your Kitchen by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby is mostly "main dish" salads, but many of them can be altered to work as side dishes as well. I've made several of their recipes, but mostly use the book for ideas for ingredient combinations and dressings. I highly recommend it.

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I have this one also -- it's wonderful. And thanks for the reminder -- time to "cook" out of it again.

- L.

[hapacooking]

Raising the Salad Bar is a fairly new one which I have used and it has some great recipes.

http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Salad-Bar-Gr...50515011&sr=8-1

[fooey]

Thank you all very much for these.

And now I'm off to Amazon.com to make myself poorer in money, but richer in life...

[Kayakado]

I have "Salad for All Seasons by Barbara Gibbons published in 1982. I wouldn't say it is the definitive book but I find recipes in there when looking for stuff from 20 years ago. I needed a Green Goddess dressing and having never tasted any, this book gave me a place to start.

[Shinboners]

I love "Salads - The New Main Course" by Peter Gordon.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Salads-Main-Course...51334160&sr=8-1

[helenjp]

I'm with Shinboners...I'm finding Peter Gordon's "Salads" very interesting. The book might date...flipping through it, I was inclined to think "mango...roast tomatoes...meh", but by then it was too late - within an hour, I'd made two recipes from the book.

It would be a mistake to think that you can't make Asparagus, Baby Potato, Rocket and Watercress Salad with Roast Olives, Sultanas, and Cherry Tomatoes just because you live in a country that never sells sultanas and doesn't always sell raisins (even in the beer snack aisle where they usually reside), rocket and baby potatoes are out of season, and somebody ate the last of the asparagus. No. For a start, the dressing vs. ingredient dynamic (had to get THAT word in!) is worthy of attention in every recipe, and here he uses a soy/vinegar dressing that pulls the bland, the sweet, and the peppery/aromatic together well. Secondly, although the ingredient list is as trendy as a professional chef's ingredient list is likely to be, it is NOT chosen entirely with the photographs in mind, nor is it just a mindless trend-bend. Since a salad has to be fresh to be good, subbing ingredients is unavoidable. Things that really sing, or howl or moan together make it that much easier for me to think of plausible alternatives.

The book is bigger than I thought it would be...over 150 pages. There is one short page on basic dressings, and I'm giving nothing away, but bet that many salad-oriented readers will find fine recipes for modern dressing ingredients that are already at their fingertips. There are sections on canape salads and dessert salads, and the rest of the book is grouped under vegetable salads, cheese salads, seafood...etc. These salads are intended to make up a good part of the meal, and some of the recipes are really a plate of two or three complementary salads.

This is not lettuce plus one to fill out the BBQ plate - you'll need to read and think - but that's why this whole book of salad recipes works. I have lots of good salad ideas clipped in ones and twos from newspapers or in other cookbooks, but generally, salad cookbooks either rely on outre ingredients plus vinaigrette (no good if you don't shop at the same place the author shops at), or they are drearily predictable. This is the thriller of salad cookbooks - a real page-turner!

[malarkey]

Ok... so it's been ~3 years... and that means that maybe just maybe a new salad cookbook has been released and someone found it fabulous.

I live on salads, a LOT. They are so easy to throw together at the end of the day and as previously mentioned are great for warmer weather.

Anything new that someone is cooking out of & loving?

[janeer]

Lettuce in Your Kitchen by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby is mostly "main dish" salads, but many of them can be altered to work as side dishes as well. I've made several of their recipes, but mostly use the book for ideas for ingredient combinations and dressings. I highly recommend it.

I have this as well; also use it mainly for ideas. This is the only salad book I have (mainly because I always ate at their restaurants). I do think Bobby Flay has a lot of nice salads in his books. So does Alice Waters (Chez Panisse books).