Salad Days: This Summer, Liven Up Your Plate

This summer, liven up your plate and your palate with these fresh, delicious, and fabulously filling concoctions from new cookbook Around the World in 120 Salads—a global tour of the planet’s tastiest greens, grains, and proteins.

- Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi

My husband, Giancarlo, and I love salads: the crunch of fresh vegetables, lively colorful leaves, and punchy dressings. They sharpen our minds and give us energy yet still fill us up without leaving us sluggish and tired. For years, Giancarlo, an Italian, was mainly a pasta man, but then he learned he has diabetes; he had to lose weight, give up sugar, and eat fewer carbohydrates. This meant less pasta, and no more cappuccino with sugar, cake, or cookies. Then, just weeks later, he was told he is intolerant to gluten. Poor Giancarlo! He had to give up conventional pasta, bread, and pizza—all the things a traditional Italian man loves. On the bright side, no one told him he shouldn’t eat vegetables, so he can eat salad!

Months later, we found out that our son, Giorgio, is also gluten intolerant; he had been experiencing headaches, migraines, and moments when he was so tired and weak he couldn’t get up. So now we are pretty much gluten free as a family, and vegetables take center stage. At our home in England, we grow plenty of our own, and try to buy local and organic when possible.

Salad is fresh, rich in nutrients, usually low in sugar, and often gluten free. The word “salad” comes from herbe salato, meaning “salted leaves,” referring to a bowl of dressed leaves, and dates back at least to ancient Rome. Pliny the Elder, the ancient-Roman writer, wrote to a friend about a salad kept cool with snow and reprimanded him for being too busy with dancing girls to notice this amazing phenomenon. The Italian gardener and writer Giacomo Castelvetro was horrified by the eating habits of the English in the 1600s and wrote a whole book about how they should eat more salad. He didn’t want us to waste the herbs and leaves around us and wanted us to use a greater variety of them.