SALAD AS A MEAL by Patricia Wells: A Terrific New Cookbook

I have a hopeless weakness for cookbooks. In fact the book shelves in my home office are positively groaning with them, and during a recent trip to Switzerland, I spent several hours fighting off temptation at Librairie Gastéréa, which is located in Lausanne and features cookbooks and other works on gastronomy and oenology, as well as food and cooking themed literature. As is invariably the case, I’m still regretting the fact that I didn’t spring for a 1921 English language food guide to France or another cookbook that was devoted entirely to oysters.

As avidly as I collect cookbooks, however, I have to admit I don’t use them very often. In fact what usually happens is that I read a new book from cover to cover, find a recipe or five that sound promising, give them a try, take them into my daily cooking cannon if they’re good, and move on. Only the really good cookbooks make their way to the woefully small and alarmingly bulging shelf in the kitchen, where I refer to them often.

Still, it was with great curiosity that I read SALAD AS A MEAL, Patricia Wells’s latest book, this past weekend. After a few pages, I started pasting Post-It notes into the book to mark recipes that interested me, and then I gave up, because in the end, it would have been easier to mark those recipes that didn’t interest me. Frankly, I was a little surprised, too, since the idea of a cookbook devoted to salads struck me as somewhat improbable. I mean, I invent new salads all of the time depending on what’s in the fridge and as a great vehicle for leftovers, so I rather doubted I was in need of inspiration.

As it turns out, I was wrong, since this book brims with recipes that I actually want to make, and since the weather in Paris was gorgeous last weekend, I went to work right away. As luck would have it, we had a lot of leftover roasted leg of lamb in the fridge, and Wells’s recipes for “Lamb Salad with Potatoes, Peppers, Tarragon and Cherry Tomatoes” offered a delicious way to finish up this roast. Her “Spicy Asian Squid Salad” was delicious for Sunday night dinner, too, and as soon as real tomatoes come into season–the only ones I’d buy in Paris right now are the tiny organic plum tomatoes I get at a stand at the Saturday morning market in Les Batignolles, they’re many other more summery salads I can’t wait to sample.

Ultimately, this is a great book for busy people with demanding palates who want to eat interesting, healthy food, and I suspect it’ll also be a very popular house present this summer and also very much appreciated by the thousands of people like myself who work at home and want help in escaping from the lunch rut, which is how I described the dozen or so dishes I make over and over again at noon, because they’re fast, delicious and use ingredients that I often have at hand. So perhaps the greatest compliment I can offer this good-looking new volume is to say that it will live in the kitchen and not on the dusty shelves of my office.

Gastéréa, rue Cité-Derrière 3, CH-1005 Lausanne, Switzerland, Tel. 41-21-312-2823, Fax 41-21-312-2825, E-mail : gasterea@citycable.ch