Making friends with salad

An unlamented ex of mine used to declare “You make no friends with salad.” One of the many benefits of life without him has been learning how satisfying salad can be, in flavour, texture and sheer calorific satiety.
Beautiful weather last Sunday prompted my housemate to cancel a plan to go out for lunch, substituting an afternoon in the garden with chilled bottles of champagne and a table covered in salads improvised from the contents of the fridge. A Swedish-inspired concoction of prawns with cucumber, dill and yoghurt made a cool but filling central dish, while a bag of rocket tossed with the dressing taught to me by my father added greenery to our plates. The dressing is very simply 3 or 4 spoons of olive oil to one of vinegar (usually red wine, because that’s what I tend to have in the store-cupboard), with crushed garlic and salt and pepper. The key is to mix all of this vigorously at the bottom of the salad bowl until it emulsifies. Then you put the leaves in on top. Just before people are ready to eat the salad, you toss it vigorously until every leaf is evenly coated with dressing.
This seems to astonish people with how delicious it is, despite its simplicity. After years of blushing prettily at the compliments and thinking how clever I was to make such good dressing, I realised that the secret was simply in the emulsification and the tossing. It is fashionable to serve green salad naked with dressing on the side to be drizzled over the leaves on the plate. This results in lettuce dressed like a classical Greek maiden: quite a lot of stuff on the body, but so unevenly distributed that a great deal of naked flesh is visible. If your dressing is designed to balance with the flavour of the lettuce (and if you think lettuce has no flavour, you’re not eating the right sort), this is very unsatisfactory.
It is presumably designed to overcome the problem that leaves that sit around in the dressing room in full costume go limp and soggy, but surely any dinner too formal to have the salad tossed at table is formal enough that someone will be available in the kitchen to perform the task there? In which case, they can take the pleasure of tossing it in their bare hands as recommended by Nigella – a typically sensuous and inconvenient suggestion.
Conversely, most tomato salads benefit from being dressed ahead of time to allow the flavours to merge. Tomatoes from the Isle of Wight tomato stall in Borough Market dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and freshly plucked basil leaves rounded out our salad collection (you have to put the basil leaves on after the dressing or they go disgustingly brown and soggy). Inferior tomatoes can be improved out of sight by sprinkling them with sugar an hour or so before the meal, but if you can get good tomatoes, they will even convert a reluctant tomatarian like myself.
If you are determined to force a hearty eater who despises ‘rabbit food’ to accept that salad can be enjoyable, try a huge bowl of mixed leaves with a hearty dressing, croutons fried in garlicky butter, shavings of parmesan or chunks of goats’ cheese, crispy bacon bits, perhaps some toasted pine nuts or other seeds, slices of apple and any thing else that strikes your fancy. It is not exactly the delicate, healthy option that ‘salad’ calls to mind, but accompanied with fresh bread and butter it will satisfy even the most macho of eaters. It may even win you their friendship, if you really want it.