Memories of a Salad
I tried to recreate a Cauliflower Salad, I ended up re-exploring the roots of my love for cooking.
Welcome to Tomato House. Here, I explore my love of food, the meals I cook, and how food touches all our lives. I am a home cook, taught by my parents, friends, and many failed meals. I invite you to share my meals and my thoughts, even if you can’t share my table. This is a free publication, but please subscribe to receive the latest essay in your inbox. I’d love to hear your thoughts too, so please leave a comment.
With gratitude.
My father’s favorite cookbook of all time is The Food of Southern Italy, by Carlo Middione. My Dad loved that book. He would talk about how he met Carlo at his restaurant in San Francisco once. And the book became a go-to for him, whenever he needed some culinary inspiration. My dad loved this cookbook so much it has left an imprint on my life by proxy. I can remember the cream cover with a picture of a table full of food. I remember the dog-eared pages with oil spots and all the extra recipes and bits of paper my dad stuck in between the pages. In this book, there is a recipe for a “Cauliflower Salad” that I almost remember, but I couldn’t tell you a single other dish listed in those pages.
I’m not sure how, but sometime during my youth, Cauliflower Salad became “my dish.” It was sort of assigned to me once I was old enough to reliably use a knife with limited risk of finger amputation. Every time we served Cauliflower Salad, typically Easter, it was my job to make it. My dad was definitely the head chef in our kitchen, and Cauliflower Salad was my station.
While this dish was a large part of my youth, it has fallen out of my rotation these past decades. But as I was shopping the other day, I saw a really nice head of cauliflower, and the memory of this dish came flooding back—maybe not flooding—more of a trickle. See, I couldn’t completely remember the recipe.
I couldn’t tell you the exact ingredient list or specific proportions of this recipe but a rough outline of the dish started to emerge:
One head of cauliflower cut into florets, boiled in salted water. A spoonful or so of capers, a few anchovies, minced, chopped kalamata olives, parsley, several glugs of good olive oil, red wine vinegar - wait, did it have vinegar? And finally, just enough red chili flake "to make you dance a little." The instruction “to make you dance a little” is written in the book - I think. Is it? I feel like I remember my Dad reciting the line when tasting the salad prior to service, and then he’d shake in a way that I presume was meant to be dancing. I would then roll my eyes as any good daughter, but deep down, I laughed.
So, I come home from the store and do my best to make what I could remember of that salad. I serve it with a steak, and some bread. As I reach into the depths of my mind to remember the specific tasting notes of this salad, a fistful of other memories come up as well.
While boiling the florets, I remember becoming so proud of my salad that I used it in a school assignment. I had a speech class where I had to give a demonstration presentation, and I could think of nothing better than to show off my cooking skills. I brought partially prepared ingredients, got special permission to carry a knife to school for my chopping and cutting, and, in front of 30 public school students, did my own version of a cooking show. I even used the line “make you dance a little,” thinking it would convey fun and personality. After my speech, none of my classmates wanted a taste. I guess I lost them at anchovies and capers.
When mincing the anchovies, I remember that for Easter, my brother also had his own official dish, Squid with Peas and Onions. But I can’t remember if that was also a Carlo recipe. I remember my brother being annoyingly fastidious while cleaning the squid - our differing personalities reflected in our cooking styles. Oliver cooks with scientific and engineering precision. I operate more on vibes. This break in our personalities and cooking styles triggers yet another memory. As an adult, I was visiting my brother and decided to make a pie. I asked him to pick up a pie tin for me. He asked me not only the diameter I would need but the depth and angle of the sides of the dish. Bumfuddled, I answer, “I don’t know, dude, whichever looks most pie-like.” He felt that answer insufficient, so he bought several different tins to cover all eventualities. Such is the difference in siblings.
I add the condiments—capers, anchovies, and olives—to the oil in the bottom of the bowl while the cauliflower cooks. I don’t remember if the recipe subscribes this technique, but it seems like a good idea to let the oil infuse a little with the condiments. I drain the cauliflower and add it to the bowl, still warm, then toss it all together.
I taste my cauliflower salad. It’s exceedingly simple—a vegetable with condiments. It’s remarkable how such simplicity can become greater than the sum of its parts. The anchovies, capers, and olives add to a complex brininess that is far more interesting than salt alone. The warm cauliflower absorbs the infused oil, seasoning each bite all the way through. The vinegar, which I do finally decide to add after much debate, adds a zing that played nice with the heavy saltiness of the other ingredients. The parsley ensures the salad still felt fresh. The flavors are as remembered. Salty, acidic. Substantive.
But did I even do it right? I think this is what I remember, but was this actually the dish that I made as a high school sophomore in front of my classmates during third period? And, for that matter, were all those accompanying memories accurate?
I call my Dad. “Uh…do you still have that Cauliflower Salad recipe?” He sends it over.
I look at the recipe. It’s barely half a page. The irony that such a short list of instructions occupies such a large space in my mind. Anchovies, check. Capers, check. Olives, check. Parsely, check. Vinegar? Damn! There wasn’t any vinegar. Red Chill Flakes, check. WAIT! Where’s the line about dancing? It’s not there! Did my dad make up the line? Did he get it from Carlo’s TV show? Where did that memory come from? I didn’t make that up. It was real! I feel like I’m in Inception. What is real? What is imagined?
I choose not to crash out in a vortex of existential crisis over a salad and take another bite. It tastes great. I got pretty close to the original, and I like the addition of vinegar.
Upon reflection, it seems fated that this would be one of the first things I learned to make on my own. Even though I haven’t made this for decades, the dish feels so self-evidently foundational to my current cooking style. It’s a vegetable. It has terrific fermented things. A preference for olive oil. It’s salty! These are all tricks I lean into today when coming up with a meal.
So maybe I didn’t remember everything perfectly. I allowed taste to be my guide down memory lane. And taste like our rememberings is peculiarly ephemeral - intangible and impermanent as is each moment of our lives. It makes sense to me why food then becomes so entangled with memories. Memories that may cling to food but really have very little to do with the meal. Rather, flavors unlock the vault of forgotten feelings. The pride I took in learning my own special dish. My comical and stereotypical annoyance at my older brother. The adorable, if cringeworthy, cooking demonstration at school. So when we recreate a dish, we also get to relive these moments ever so briefly. But as the tastes lift from our palates, the moments slip away again. And each time we serve the dish, hopefully, a new memory is added to the vault.
I begin to wonder if I look too often for new techniques and flavors. Trying to create something different each night. Yes, new recipes are fun and experimentation encouraged. Yet, as I eat my Cauliflower Salad, I’m enchanted by all the dishes that emerge on our plates over and over again, whether these dishes are traditional, complicated, or as simple as a vegetable salad. When we choose to create a canon of family meals - dishes that are repeated frequently and lovingly- these dishes collect our memories over the years and return them to us with each bite.
I think back to my dad’s old recipe book. He loves that book. Yes, because the recipes are reliable and tasty. However, I wonder how much that recipe book now serves as a scrapbook for the memories of his life. The meals he prepared for family and friends. The dishes he taught his children. Each stained page a testament to a delicious life.