Penn: This is Not a Salad Recipe: An Exploration into Spiritual Practice

When I was a kid in the American South, my Just Grandma had a VCR and exactly three video tapes. I watched all of those movies until the tapes disintegrated. One was the live action Popeye (Meh, but Grandpa really liked Popeye), one was Who Framed Roger Rabbit (My favorite of the three, and a clear influence on who I became, in retrospect), and the third was a cartoon adaptation of “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.”  I grew out of that one first, and barely remember it, but its underlying metaphor stuck with me. I was a Country Mouse, it told me, and I ought to learn to love it. The City, as it was termed in my adaptation, was big and scary and strange.

The problem, however, is that I’m really not a Country Mouse, and I didn’t start to flourish in my life until I left both the South and my resistance to becoming a City Mouse behind. Likewise, in my spiritual practice I was only able to fully grow into myself when I stopped trying to be a good pagan—you know, dancing around naked in the moonlight collecting moss in mason jars, or whatever—and started building my own thing.

Like, the Earth is beautiful and important and absolutely holy. It needs protection and deserves the worship it inspires. But me? I don’t even own a pair of hiking boots, and if I never go camping again, I’ll be good with that. 

Put less glibly, I see and respect the majesty of the natural world around me, but I’ve never felt called to worship it. Magic, language, and study, on the other hand, do call to me, and so my worship—hell, my whole life—is built around those things. It’s made me into a very precise man.

In the Norse Pagan context there are two major classes of gods: the City Gods and the Country Gods—wait, sorry, the Aesir and the Vanir. The Aesir are gods like Frigg, goddess of a well-kept household, Odin, god of secrets and mysteries, and their son Thor, god of going to work every damn day. Not to mention Loki, adopted god of needful change, and my Lady Sága, with language and magic. These are the gods that I understand, and that understand me. The Vanir, meanwhile, are gods focusing on the regenerative and life-giving cycles of the Earth like the twins Frey and Freyja, each with a different take on fertility, and their father Njord with the bounty of the sea. I’ve just never really connected with the Vanir. It’s a failure on my part, I’m sure, but not one that’s given me a lot of grief.

But lately, without meaning to, I’ve realized that I quietly built a practice of Vanic worship into my life—one that’s among the biggest bits of magic I engage with on a daily basis. See, we live in Ithaca, an arty little college town plopped right down in the middle of rural New York. Go in any direction for long enough, and you start seeing the “Farmers Love Trump” signs and Blue Lives Matter flags, but my little haven is under the protection of Cornell University, with its extensive agriculture programs. And so we have, according to Newsweek, the best Farmer’s Market in the US. 

I can believe that claim; it’s pretty great. My wife El and I go every Saturday, often also hitting the smaller Wednesday market up the street, and at least during the growing season the bulk of our groceries come from local farmers. We’re at the very tip of tomato season, having just gotten the first cherries and heirlooms in the last couple weeks. Asparagus is long gone, but we’re still drowning in zucchini. We are a part of this little bit of the earth, and it sustains us.

This is a practice that snuck up on us, to any extent.  El is no more a Country Mouse than I am… she may well be even less of one than me. But what she is is a phenomenal cook. It started with cooking more of our own meals at home, each meal becoming slowly more elaborate; a simple red sauce pasta got fresh pasta, then the tomatoes became our home canned tomatoes, which we got in bulk the year before from the same farm that supplies the CSA. If it gets something like meatballs or ricotta, those’ll be ours too. And at that point, why not throw in the sourdough starter she’s been ritually tending for the past year for garlic bread? Or maybe use some of those tomatoes that just came in and figure out bruschetta? And that’s just Monday. 

If you’re thinking that sounds like a lot, you are absolutely correct; it is. It’s too much, sometimes. But is it really a spiritual practice if it isn’t too much now and then? 

Now, El and I are a deeply integrated pair; we share most aspects of our spiritual lives. But, crucially, I don’t cook. My relationship to food is, in a word, fucked. Between some OCD that means I find nearly every aspect of eating unpleasant, a history of food related trauma, and migraines that make my appetite dodgy at the best of times, I simply don’t get on with “meals.” But, early in our living together, it became clear just how important they are to her. Not just as a luxury, or a necessary part of being alive, but as an active element of her spiritual practice.

As a Country Mouse transplant, this is a context I am deeply familiar with, even as I am a bit of an outsider to it. My grandmother–the other one–was like El, and her house was always brimming with food. Snacks and cakes covered every surface of her kitchen, your favorite ice cream was in the freezer, and there was invariably something hot on the stove when you got there. She was not very showy with love, but when, at fourteen, I confounded all the adults in my life by becoming a vegetarian, she quietly changed every meal she made. The first time I visited after telling her, she’d made…ok, so there are these things called cracklin bread, which are little fried breads with hard, crunchy meat bits (where I’m from they’re usually pig skins), right? And she had a second pan with “vegetarian” breads for me. Way more of them than I could possibly eat. Of course, they were almost certainly still cooked in lard; that’s not a thing she’d have really thought about, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she loved me, and so she made me food. So when El made me food to show me love, I knew how to understand that.

At some point, for unrelated reasons, the job of ‘salads’ got handed to me. I was given little more than a loose recipe for a red wine vinaigrette, and suddenly found myself in the kitchen working next to my wife in the midst of her daily worship. I suppose I must have thought about making them artfully and thoughtfully, so as to be a match for the gift of El’s cooking, but in truth my growing affection for the job was gradual. 

These days, I get home from the market and spend a couple hours with the fruit and vegetables, cleaning and sorting them. The saying is “one bad apple can spoil the barrel,” and it is quite literally true, which, notably, is why we need to abolish the police. Cut, bruised, or otherwise damaged vegetables will make the other ones they’re stored with spoil faster. I like to go through delicate fruits like strawberries one at a time, sorting them into however many bins of “eat first” to “pristine” makes sense. I’ll do whatever trimming or pre-prep I can on vegetables that can handle it–goodbye carrot greens and radish roots. Things like green onions, which I use a ton of, can be trimmed to fit into their containers. 

I’d been led to believe, in my youth, that different vegetables have very specific and particular storage needs, but basically everything that fits in them and can be refrigerated, goes into little glass jars with a dry paper towel. The internet will tell you to moisten that paper towel when you put it in, but it’s lying to you. The dry paper towel will pick up the moisture from the vegetables themselves, keeping them from drying out in the jar, but also keeping the jar from accumulating condensation as sitting water. Since starting this, I’ve literally only lost one strawberry to ‘going off in the fridge,’ a herculean task considering the sheer amount of ADHD that runs this house.

It’s about the same, practically speaking, to do the cleaning and prep steps just before you cook with them. I’ve certainly seen suggestions to do it that way. It’s sensible; it’s not like I’m not exhausted when I get home from shopping. That said, it sure does make meal prep easier and nicer, and it’s a critical part of what turns this into a spiritual practice. Thankfully, our ritual Saturday meal is stir fry, which highlights the vegetables that were fresh at the market that week and doesn’t inherently need a salad to pair with it, since I am so very done in the kitchen by the time dinner rolls around. Even so, the whole process ends up being a highlight of my week.

I suggest an audiobook. (Yeah, everyone says they can’t follow audiobooks, while they’re off watching YouTube videos at chipmunk speeds, but I promise it’s a learnable skill. I missed most of the first few books I tried to listen to, too.) I like fiction for it, particularly because when you get going and get lost in a really good book, you infect the whole kitchen with that joy. Later, when I’m at the cutting board about to peel and slice a carrot, my brain will offer a moment of the book I’m listening to back to me. “Oh, hey, remember the last time you saw this carrot? That was when–”  

It’s nice. The whole thing is just nice. It wasn’t designed to be a spiritual practice. Like I said, I’m a City Mouse at heart, and I barely noticed that it was becoming something important until it had been one for some time. It’s funny, because I’ve been delightedly texting the priestess of my kindred, mooning over El’s developing Vanic practice over the last year as she learned to tend the fireplace and adopted that sourdough starter I mentioned earlier—he’s named Tharmas, of course, after William Blake’s second most Vanic god. Meanwhile, I’m over here making my own; I’ve touched every vegetable in this house, met them all, and taken them into my custody. They’re an absolute pleasure to use. It’s intimate in a way only food can be.

Which brings us to the focal point of this whole ritual for me: the salad itself. I make one for most of our meals, carefully tailored to whatever El is cooking; if it’s something large like a steak, the salad needs to compensate. It’ll go red wine vinegar and a coarse ground black pepper. Maybe lime. Or maybe I pull out a hot pepper, right? But all of that would overpower and choke out a more delicate meal like roast chicken, which starts with white wine vinegar, and a heavy pour of lemon. Maybe I will toss in some lemon thyme, or a splash of white wine.

A well-executed salad should elevate your whole meal. It is a celebration of life and home; if you’re lucky enough to be able to eat locally, or at least seasonally, it’s a celebration of the harvest, highlighting what’s fresh and growing right now. You just can’t get the kind of flexibility you need for that out of a rote recipe or a pre-bottled dressing; something that is made the same every time can only ever be what it is. A salad is best thought of as a set of principles. 

Caprese:

The very first, core principle for any salad comes from an old, since edited, Kenji Lopez-Alt recipe for caprese salad where his advice is to get good ingredients and “don’t f#&k with it.” It makes sense—a caprese salad is simple: tomato, oil, basil, fresh mozzarella or burratta, salt, pepper, and that’s it. Bad ingredients and bad form have nowhere to hide. (Lopez-Alt and I agree on Balsamic vinegar, which only serves to mask the delicate flavor of your tomato and cheese.) A caprese salad is a riot of color and flavor, where serving and presentation has as much to do with the end result as the ingredients. It is a clear, primal celebration of late summer.

It’s not a tossed salad; it’s an arranged one, made flat onto the plate or serving dish, so it’s a good dish to practice plating with. Cut each tomato into bite size pieces, in whatever shapes feel pleasing to you. Let the tomato tell you how it wants to be cut; they all have opinions on this, you just need to learn how to listen to them. That takes a little trial and error on irregular shaped tomatoes, but it’s worth the effort. Bring one of these to a garden party and watch it disappear.

Garden salad with Vinaigrette:

Next, let’s examine the garden salad with a vinaigrette. This is a good baseline salad; it compliments a wide variety of meals, and has a lot of room to experiment and change things up with minimal risk. It’s possible to make a bad vinaigrette, but you kinda have to try, and you get plenty of opportunities to fix the dressing as you go. (In fact, a fun exercise is to make a mistake with the dressing on purpose, and try to make a good dressing out of it anyway. You can learn a lot with that, and you’ll get an interesting dressing out of it, I promise.)

A vinaigrette is an emulsification, which just means it’s water based ingredients like lemon juice and vinegar suspended in oil to make a creamy textured dressing. Mayonnaise is another, as are any number of beauty creams. They can be a little finicky, and are prone to breaking—when the water bits separate out from the oil—but in my experience dressings are pretty forgiving. That said, if your salad dressing breaks in the bowl, it’s not a problem like a broken mayonnaise would be. Consider bruschetta, which is literally just tomato, salt, oil, and vinegar, without even an attempt at emulsifying it. Bruschetta is delicious; you’ll be fine. The gods and your dinner guests are all a lot easier to please than Gordon Ramsey. So, let’s get started.

• Gather your supplies. You will need a small bowl to mix the dressing in, a small whisk and/or a stick blender, a tasting spoon, cutting board, and knife.

I like to use a stick blender for a vinaigrette, as it makes the dressing smooth and airy, and fool-proofs the emulsification a bit, but I suggest experimenting with this (and every other) step. A hand whisk makes a thinner dressing with bits of softened garlic and onion in it, which is also a distinct pleasure. 

• Put the following ingredients in your small bowl:

  • Alliums: At least two cloves of garlic. 

Garlic is an emulsifier, which means it’s one of the ingredients that helps literally hold your dressing together. It’s doing most of the work in this dressing, although the mustard (below) also contributes.

Modifications:

• Use more garlic. I usually use three or four cloves, but I’ve literally never gone “oh, there’s too much garlic in this dressing.”

• Add other alliums. Anything in the onion family will be good here. I often use about a quarter of a small yellow onion, but I’ve been getting really good results with red ones lately. If you’re using a stick blender, these will thicken your dressing quickly. It’s good to remember that onions, especially yellow onions, are sweet in the context of a salad dressing. If you use a lot of onion, you’ll want to add extra salt or citrus juice to balance that sweetness.

• Whole scallions and garlic scapes are great here if you want a more vegetal salad dressing.

• If you’re using a stick blender, your alliums can be basically whole at this step, but if you’re whisking by hand, you’ll want to mince them to whatever size you’d like to see on your salad.

• Citrus juice: Lemon juice is your default here.
  I measure literally nothing, as the ratios of the liquid ingredients is part of what gives you the flexibility to make this dressing what you need from it, but on paper you want the ratio of oil to liquid ingredients (this and those added in step 4) to be around 3:1. I’d guess that in practice, I go closer to 2:1.

Modifications:

• Fresh juice vs. bottled juice: Fresh squeezed lemon and limes are nice, but they’re weirdly pricey. I suggest looking in your grocery store for a brand of lemon juice that isn’t in a bottle shaped like a lemon or made from concentrate. But even that’s fine in a pinch. Just avoid anything that’s sweetened for this step.

• Add lime juice. Same rules apply to lime juice as lemon. Adding even a little lime to your lemon juice will change the dressing a lot, as it’s a very bitter citrus. All lime is a bold choice and pairs interestingly with Mexican dishes, but can be a bit overwhelming to the dressing. Lime is bitter.

• Salt: more than you think.
  You’ll have opportunities to add more salt later, though, so don’t sweat it too much yet. The thing about salt is that it doesn’t just make your food taste salty, it makes your food taste brighter and bolder. It’s as much alchemy as cooking.

• Mustard: I like a classic dijon.
  You don’t need much at all—this is mostly here as emulsification protection—but adding more will give your dressing a little kick. I use around a quarter of a teaspoon at default.

• If you are using a stick blender, black pepper and herbs that you’d like blended into the dressing can go in here now.

• If using a stick blender: blend until the alliums are broken up.
  If using a whisk: whisk until the mustard and salt have mixed in.

We’re gonna let the dressing sit for a while at this point and come back to it. 

This lets the onion and garlic break down a little, which both softens them in texture, takes the sharpest notes out of the flavor, and helps the dressing emulsify later.

This is a good time to make the rest of your salad. Largely, the make-up of your salad is determined by what vegetables are around, but there are still things to consider and decisions to make. 

Greens: always taste your ingredients, but especially make sure to taste your greens. A lot of salad greens are bitter or tart, and your dressing will need to compensate for that. Consider the texture of the leaf—for instance, if it’s tough it might be more pleasant to tear or cut them into smaller pieces. Also consider the stems; how much of this leaf do you actually want in your mouth? It can be obnoxious to pick the stems off of every single piece of arugula, but it’s better than being surprise attacked by one when you try to swallow it. Your salad greens are worth taking time with given how much of the bowl they’ll occupy.

Tomatoes: I know a lot of people hate tomatoes; I am not one of them. Tomatoes are basically a whole religious experience of their own in this house between our decadent caprese salads and the five weeks every summer we spend canning and drying them for use throughout the year. If a tomato needs to be sliced for your salad, that should happen last, right before the toss, as cut tomatoes get mushy if you look at them wrong. Cherry tomatoes are an obvious delight. If they’re small enough to go straight in the bowl, great! But for an extra treat, save a few of the larger ones to the side. They’re a surprise tool that will help us later.

Past that, cucumber, green onion, and root veggies like turnip or radish are all great to bulk out a salad. Small touches like flaked parmesan cheese, spicy microgreens, crunchy bean sprouts, or even whole leaf herbs are a lot of fun for adding texture and personality to your salad.  As are croutons, although obviously, like cut tomatoes, you’ll want to hold off on adding those until the last moment. 

Cut:  Size of bite is a huge consideration, especially with root veg as they can often be hard and dense. It’s never a bad idea to tailor the whole salad’s bite size to what the root veg wants. A salad with large chunks has a brash, bold personality where each thing you put on your fork has a whole statement to make on its own. Make smaller slices, and you encourage bites with multiple things, moving the focus of the salad to the way they all mesh together in the bowl. Generally, I think it’s more aesthetic to have one ‘type’ of cut for the whole bowl, but if you have a star veggie that you want to highlight, making it the only thing that’s cut large can be effective. 

And now back to the dressing.

• Add liquid ingredients
  This is where your dressing’s personality will develop. You want to keep an eye on your total liquid level, and taste as you go. It should be loud, sour, and sharp after this step, as the oil will rein it in a lot. If something’s just ineffably wrong with it, probably add salt.

  • Soy Sauce: Just a little. Adds a bass note, and fullness to the dressing. If your dressing feels flat, add more soy.

  • White wine vinegar: White wine vinegar makes your citrus pop without adding the extra sweetness that more lemon juice would provide, and it is worth throwing in at least a splash of white wine vinegar, even if you’re making a red wine vinaigrette.

  • Optional liquid ingredients:

    • Red wine vinegar: sour, a little sweet undertone, and heavy. Good for meals you’d instinctively pair with red wine, like burgers or red sauce pasta dishes.

    • Wine: just a splash or red or white wine can really round out a dressing. Be careful, though, they can both overpower quickly. Good for when your dressing is just too citrusy, or when you want your salad to make a statement. If you go too hard on this, soy and white wine vinegar can both help pull it back.

    • Hot sauce: A splash or three of vinegar style hot sauce can be fun here. Our local farmer’s market has one guy who makes a lot of these, so we have options like apple and herbs, but even the tomato hot can be nice with the right meal.

If you want, you can let your dressing sit for a bit again here, as it’ll keep maturing and changing. Get the table set, fix yourself a dinner drink, get yourself ready to eat.

• Slowly add the olive oil, blending or whisking as you go.
  
  The official ratio you’ll find recommended, as I mentioned earlier, is 3 parts oil to 1 liquid, but that’s not a strict rule and I suggest going by texture. Add oil and blend or whisk until it starts to look and taste like a salad dressing. Go slowly; you want to add enough oil to make the dressing stick to your vegetables, and feel like a dressing, but not so much that it mutes your dressing. This is one of the few cases where more fat isn’t necessarily better for flavor.
  
  Technically, you should use a whisk for this step, as olive oil is delicate and the stick blender will make it just a little bitter. That said, I use the blender for it. You can go faster with it, and your dressing is a lot less likely to break on you. Important if you’re gonna be as laissez-faire about measurements as I am inevitably going to be.

Gently toss your salad with the dressing. If you’re not sure how much you’ve made, add it slowly as you toss to make sure you’re not going to drown your salad. I suggest stopping to grind in some fresh black pepper a couple times as you go. Wooden salad spoons are supposed to be better than metal tongs for not bruising your more delicate ingredients, but tongs are more convenient, so I’m just careful with them, leaving them closed for the majority of my toss.

I feel like a tossed salad ought to be served in bowls rather than family style, as the heavy ingredients will invariably fall to the bottom of your mixing bowl no matter how well you toss it. Let that happen, and use it to your advantage. By filling the bowls evenly and at the same time, you can ensure that each bowl gets a bed of lettuce, with the cut vegetables on top. 

This also gives you the opportunity to garnish the bowls before you serve the salad–your salad deserves to feel pretty. One last large grind of fresh black pepper on each bowl is dead simple, and will make the salad extremely fragrant. Those tomatoes I had you hold aside are great for this. Recently, I’ve been using the largest cherry tomatoes this way: slice them in half and lay them on top of the salad, such that you can sprinkle a nice thick crust of salt onto the cut edge of the tomato. Be extra fancy, and put a couple tiny basil leaves on top of one.

These little touches are important. At the end of the day, salad is all just little touches, from getting to know the vegetables when they first enter my home, to stemming the lettuce, my ever evolving salad dressing, and tossing the salad with black pepper. You could skip any of them. Hell, you could skip all of them, open yourself a pre-washed bag of iceberg and dump a veggie platter on top and still get a salad out of the process. I’ve done that kind of thing plenty in my life, and it’s a perfectly valid way to feed yourself. You could even make a spiritual practice out of it, were you inclined to. That lettuce comes from a farm somewhere, and is still a gift from the Earth.

Beyond the Garden Salad:

Once you’ve got the principles down, you can do a lot from the starting point of your garden salad and vinaigrette. In the fall, forget out of season tomatoes and cucumbers, and try sliced tart apples, walnuts, and a mild goat cheese. I suggest taking the dressing in a lemon and white wine direction for that one, but that’s a rule I quite happily break when the meal calls for it. For a particularly heavenly experience, blend a little of the goat cheese into your dressing. 

Another option is to drop the lettuce and use a grain or pasta for your substrate. I love farro for this, because it brings its own salt and bass notes to the salad and pairs beautifully with anything done on a grill. Cucumber is the star of a farro salad, with its watery crunch subbing in for the textural loss of the lettuce. Add spring onions, halved cherry tomatoes, parmesan cheese, parsley, and any other herbs you like. Don’t worry about when you cut your tomatoes; unlike a lettuce based salad, it’s best to let this rest for a couple hours in the fridge before serving it, as the flavors will meld and change over time. You trade the crispness of fresh cut vegetables for the punch of lightly marinated ones instead. It’s nearly the same as the garden salad in every way while you’re making it, but is a wildly different salad on the plate. You can serve them side by side without it feeling monotonous, and in fact I often do. 

In America right now the government has declared open war on farms and farmers. This is spiritual warfare, and I’ll fight anyone who tries to say otherwise. I’m a disabled man who works from home with my wife who does the cooking; I’m lucky to be well enough to do all of this, to have the time and access to do it. Maybe that’s why it feels so important that I do: when prepared with intention and care, the food we eat is so much more than sustenance. It is worship; a gift of attention and appreciation to the gods and the land. It is joy, and love, and protest.

That’s the magic of the salad, and why the study of it works so well as a spiritual practice. The smallest changes in ingredients, prep, and even presentation have a huge effect on the end result. It is a simple dish, but don’t let that fool you. Think of it like minimalism in other artforms, like “Phase Patterns” by Steve Reich or the album art for Pink Floyd’s The Wall; when there is nowhere to hide, every element is elevated to prominence. Make salads like you’re making art, because you are.