Exploring culinary contrasts: Into the intriguing world of salads
old Goa cafes, like Aram in Panjim, you will find a dish of onions, tomatoes and a few spices, cooked into the gravy that serves as a base for many Indian dishes. Here it’s served by itself, with pao or puri, under the odd name of ‘salad bhaji’.
There is an echo here of Colonel Kenney-Herbert in his magisterial Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878) when he declares: “An excellent salad is that made by slicing raw ripe tomatoes with a Bombay onion.” He admits that “no man would partake of [it] just before a ball, or on his wedding day” for fear of the smell of raw onions on h is breath. But combining savoury-sweet tomatoes and pungent onions clearly has real culinary value, whether sliced as he suggests, diced like a kachumber, pulverised salsastyle or even cooked in salad bhaji.
Defining salad is surprisingly hard. In Judith Weinraub’s Salad: A Global History (2016), she struggles to connect salads, which are usually served cold, but can also be warm; which are served alongside main dishes or as a separate course or even a meal in itself; that are mostly made of leafy greens or other vegetables, but also eggs and meat; that usually have a liquid dressing, but can also just be plain cut vegetables — and let’s not forget fruit salad!
Perhaps salads should be seen as a concept. “Because salads traditionally have either consisted of or included raw vegetables, they provide a contrast in heat, texture and flavour in the context of the meal,” writes Weinraub.
The idea of salads being a contrast would include Indian
