Day 6: Salat, a Crisp & Crunchy Medieval Salad of Herbs & Greens

Take persel, sawge, grene garlec, chibolles, letyes, leek, spinoches, borage ... fennel and toun cressis, rewe, rosemarye, purslarye; laue and waishe hem clene.

excerpt from recipe for salat from Forme of Cury, c. 1390

"Refreshing" may not be the first word that pops into your head when you think of medieval food, but that's exactly what this salad, or salat, is. After all, it's chock full of crunchy greens like watercress and fragrant herbs like the above-mentioned persel (parsley), sawge (sage), and rosemayre (rosemary).

It's also simultaneously familiar and surprising, insofar as greens with oil and vinegar are certainly not culinary news to anyone, yet the addition of the fresh herbs along with raw fennel, leeks, shallots, and garlic are not usually found combined in a modern salad, and it gives this dish a decidedly unique, yet pleasant, bite. I suspect that all the herbs and fennel were present not only for flavor, but perhaps for their breath-sweetening properties. I realize that the addition of raw leeks may tend to undercut my theory somewhat, but having eaten this salad, I found that the fennel really neutralized the onion breath quite a bit. (Others who encountered me that day may beg to differ!)

Spicy West African Style Greens & Peanut Stew with Fufu

My first exposure to African food was Ethiopian cuisine, and I was hooked from the first bite. This was many years ago, at the now-defunct Blue Nile Restaurant  in Baltimore. At the time, I could barely boil spaghetti and had certainly never heard of anything as "exotic" as ghee or injera.  The rich heady flavors and brand new smells, spices, and textures were entirely mysterious and magical to me.

Garlicky Beet Greens & Swiss Chard Orecchiette

Throwing a bunch of stuff together and mixing it with some pasta is a huge bang-for-the-buck meal, and it's the perfect dish when you just don't feel like making something complicated or time-consuming.

Catfish-n-Greens

The day after eating a pile of yummy shrimp remoulade, you don't just make yourself a sandwich and call it quits. Well, I don't anyway.  And  what, I ask you,  says "Sunday supper" more than  Cajun-style catfish and spicy greens?