Does Salad Require Lettuce?

After a young life filled with iceberg lettuce, I spent years swearing off salad.  Caesar Salad intrigued me for a few months after I watched my college roommate’s father crack a raw egg into the family salad bowl.  I couldn’t decide if that was Yuck! or the greatest adventure of all time.  Yuck won out in the end.

Mostly, though, I was served tossed salads made of lettuce and tomatoes, and they were boring.  Three-bean salad was pretty good as long as lima beans weren’t included, but the grocery store versions were usually too salty.

A few years ago I began my romance with home-grown tomatoes.  Now my go-to salad is a colorful mixture of tomatoes, cucumber and radishes.  No lettuce is in sight.

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Secrets of the Radish

Radishes never seemed mysterious.  When I was growing up, they sometimes appeared as a side dish along with some slices of cucumber.  It was like an instant salad, both spicy and colorful.  Once in a while my mother put sliced raw radishes and small chunks of cucumber into a bowl of sour cream.  That would be our lunch when she’d run out of everything else.

When I began cooking, I ignored radishes unless a recipe called for them, which was almost never.