My brother set off on Boxing Day for a holiday in Australia and New Zealand, and left the blog in my care. Now that he is getting to be safely on the other side of the globe, I am naturally going to post whatever I please. Taikinapoika's favourite mottos, after all, are "Bacon is a vegetable" and "I only eat food that has a face", and while he lived in Boston he made a name for himself as a ruthless anti-vegan. Bloated by the holidays, I am nevertheless going to post a recipe for a main-course salad, one that would be certain to draw from my brother the ancient presidential campaign slogan "Where is the beef????"
Did you know?
It turns out that Where's the beef? began as a television commercial for the hamburger chain Wendy's in 1984. In it three old ladies inspect an enormous bun with a very small patty in the middle, and one of them demands to know where the beef is. That same spring Walter Mondale put the question to Gary Hart in a primary debate, having found, as he saw it, no substance in Hart's new ideas.
Today's idea came home with me years ago from a lunch café in Trieste, where the wrought-iron chairs and leopard-print seats brought Dolce & Gabbana's clothes to mind. The salad was served out of large edible pots baked from bread dough. Trieste is in the far north-eastern corner of Italy, right on the Slovenian border, and belonged to the Habsburgs for centuries, so the cooking there is said to owe as much to Vienna and the Balkans as to Italy. Pineapple and tinned sweetcorn are hardly part of that tradition, so I have named the salad after Trieste simply because that is where I found it.
The salad is quick to make and very filling, provided the helping is large enough. Its flavours pair sweet with salty. The sweet side is the work of pineapple, a green apple, sweetcorn and honey, the salty side of parmesan or grana padano shaved over the top. Rocket, by the way, is a relative of cabbage and mustard, and that is presumably where its peppery taste comes from. The pineapple has to be fresh and sweet, preferably of the Honey Gold type. I tear the leaves into a big bowl by hand, and drizzle in the honey and the oil only once the fruit and the sweetcorn have been mixed through. I have never missed any other dressing, since the pineapple and the apple are sharp enough on their own. The walnuts I scatter on top whole.
I have never got round to baking bread pots at home. Instead there is plenty of crusty white bread on the table, and it mops up the honey and oil that run to the bottom of the bowl. Making the salad takes about a quarter of an hour, and it feeds two or three.
With this I would drink a splendid Johannisberg Riesling from Washington State, though I dare say other white wines will do as well. The name is German but the wine is American. As I understand it, the wineries borrowed the Johannisberg from a famous estate on the Rhine, so that true Riesling could be told apart from everything else that has been sold here under the name.
Recipe card
Trieste Salad
- Serves 2-3
- Time about 15 min
You will need
| 1 pot | rocket, or 1 packet of wild rocket leaves |
| 1 pot | oak leaf lettuce, torn into pieces |
| 1/2 | sweet fresh pineapple (preferably of the Honey Gold type or similar) |
| 1 | green apple, peeled and diced |
| 1 tin | sweetcorn kernels in sugar and salt brine |
| a couple of tbsp | runny honey |
| a couple of tbsp | extra virgin olive oil |
| 50-100 g | walnuts, left whole |
| about 50 ml | grated parmesan or grana padano |
| black pepper from the mill |
Method
- Tear the lettuce and the rocket leaves into a large salad bowl.
- Cut the pineapple into slices a couple of centimetres thick, cut away the hard rind and dice the slices. Add to the salad.
- Mix in the drained sweetcorn and the diced apple.
- Toss with salad servers, drizzle in the honey and the olive oil, and toss some more.
- Scatter the whole walnuts over the top and shave plenty of parmesan or grana padano over them.
- Serve with plenty of crusty white bread.
