Books for Cooks: Patricia Wells’ salad days
By Janet Rausa Fuller Food Editor/jfuller@suntimes.com May 17, 2011 10:40AM
Make a meal out of ham with Comte cheese and tender greens. (Courtesy Jeff Kauck, "Salad as a Meal" by Patricia Wells)
BEHIND THE LENS
The photography in Salad as a Meal by Patricia Wells is the work of Chicago’s Jeff Kauck, whose portfolio is heavy with Chicago chefs: The Spiaggia Cookbook and Wine Bar Food by Tony and Cathy Mantuano, Chocolate and Vanilla by Gale Gand and The Salpicon Cookbook by Priscila Satkoff. He’s currently shooting Vie chef Paul Virant’s forthcoming book on canning.
Kauck and Wells hail from the same Milwaukee suburb. They lived only a few streets apart.
But they first met in 2007 at Wells’ Provence estate, where Kauck, his foodie wife and daughter had traveled to take one of Wells’ cooking classes. Kauck snapped photos during class, “because you can’t not help taking pictures,” he says. Wells saw the photos and a year later, called Kauck with an invitation: Would you like to shoot a cookbook?
Kauck, 55, a painter-turned-photographer, worked on the book in 2009 at Wells’ Provence home. A good number of the pictures were shot outside.
“The light in Provence in the summer is the best light in the world,” Kauck gushes. “There’s a color to the blue that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
His favorites from the book (see, this isn’t just girl food!) include Cobb salad, tuna tartare — really, two salads in one, as it’s served with thin slices of fennel tossed with shallots, chives, sesame seeds and sesame oil (the tartare itself flavored with those same ingredients) — and a chilled pea and buttermilk soup.
The pair just wrapped up a book on truffles, which Wells hopes will be released in the fall. That’s when Kauck will travel back to Provence to shoot yet another book for her.
Janet Rausa Fuller
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Updated: August 16, 2011 12:26AM
I know people who choke down salads as penance for their regular overconsumption of fried foods and meat products, and others who dismiss leafy greens as a waste of stomach space. Some of these are my friends and relatives, so I still love them.
But these people need converting, and Salad as a Meal (William Morrow, $34.99) by Patricia Wells might do the trick.
First things first: A salad is not just a bowl of raw leafiness. It is not reserved for ladies on a diet. It is not (and Dad, I’m talking to you) rabbit food. Wells illustrates all these beautifully. A salad, she writes, does not even need to include lettuce or greens. “A creamy chilled ricotta terrine, a protein-rich poached turkey breast dressed with herbs, a pasta flavored with a vinaigrette-like sauce of spicy mustard . . . are all salads as a meal in my book.”
Amen.
Wells, the quintessential American in Paris (the former journalist/current and prolific cookbook author has lived there and in Provence since the ’80s), offers recipes for appetizers, soups, breads, eggs and grains, and pantry items — salad “sidekicks,” any combination of which would make a fine nosh — in addition to main-course salads categorized by protein (fish and shellfish, poultry, meat).
She shows that the more thought and care taken when composing a salad, the better it will taste. None of this “everything but the kitchen sink salad” business.
Thoughtfulness doesn’t equal fussiness. I once attended a lunch at which Wells was the guest of honor. The food was from the pages of her new book at the time. One of the passed appetizers, the only one I can recall, was a tray of almond-stuffed dates. Stark, perfect almond-stuffed dates. This is her style.
Her Marinated Shrimp Salad bathes just-poached, still-warm shrimp in a mixture of lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, capers and scallions — that’s it. Penne salad with Tuna and Spicy Mustard comes together similarly: Strain canned tuna in oil, reserving the oil and warming it in a pan with a generous dab of mustard, then toss the tuna and hot, cooked pasta into that pan.
When corn is plentiful this summer, her salad of raw kernels, chopped tomatoes, avocados, scallions and bacon coated with a yogurt and lemon dressing will shoot to the top of my list.
And those dressings . . . Like chicken stock, salad dressing is so easy to make and tastes so much better when made in your kitchen rather than in some commissary 2,000 miles away, and Wells’ chapter on dressings illustrates this well.
Her Lime and Vanilla Dressing — just vanilla bean-steeped olive oil shaken with lime juice and zest — will do wonders, she writes, for any fish tartare, though you could just as well drizzle it over ripe tomatoes.
I could do without some of the cold-weather meat salads. Why make Pot-au-Feu Beef Salad when you could just have the pot-au-feu? And Wells seems to favor pistachio oil and piment d’Espelette (a French pepper powder), ingredients difficult or nearly impossible to come by for many.
You could turn to her resource guide in the back of the book for direction, just past her lists of pantry and equipment must-haves, complete with brand names, but you might suffer alternating pangs of envy and inadequacy. So, skip that.
But do let her book inspire you to treat salad as more than a dietary obligation of hacked lettuce slathered in dressing. Because everyone deserves salad, even the naysayers.
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