Making it an entrée

At the opposite end of a light but free-form composed salad is the hearty main-dish salad

with precise ingredients and proportions. A good example is the marvelous Mediterranean

Salade Niçoise in which the blend of flavors is defined by tradition. Although the recipe is not

etched in stone and you can meddle with it a little to suit your taste and diet, too much modifying

produces a different salad altogether. If the new version is a hit, name it after yourself.

Otherwise, give it your rival cook's name.

Main-dish salads are great for light repasts. You can prepare them well ahead of the meal,

some salads even days in advance. In fact, most of them don't reach full flavor until they rest and

mature in their dressing or marinade, the ingredients fuse and intensify their flavors for hours or

even a day, like a robust soup or stew. To make the cook's job still easier, they are often most

flavorful when you serve at room temperature, so you can pre-plate them hours before the meal.

Some of these complete-meal salads are time consuming to prepare, require quite a

number of ingredients and plenty of chopping. But the total time involved in their preparation is

still small compared to preparing a full meal. And you needn't serve much else with them. Fresh

hearty bread, hot biscuits or scones are a welcome accompaniment, possibly with some cheeses

or cold cuts.

To allow for finicky eaters, prepare two or even three salads with different styles, flavors

and heartiness. Since you serve them at the same time and at least some of the guests will want to

try each, don't make the flavor differences so extreme that they clash. Wouldn't you hesitate to

serve a Tex-Mex chili salad with an Indian curried rice salad?

Not all main-dish salads have rigid recipes. Some are sympathetic to your creative

culinary urge and accept whatever you have on hand. Pasta salad is a perfect example. As long as

you keep the proportion of pasta, vegetables and dressing reasonably unaltered, you are free to

create. You can add any vegetable that you would add to a tossed green or composed salad.

You can even vary the pasta. In fact, why not use two or three different pastas with

contrasting shapes and sizes? If they all have the same cooking time, throw them in the pot

together. If the cooking times vary, add them to the boiling water at staggered times so they all

end up perfectly cooked, al dente, when the timer rings.

If you haven't already added main-dish salads to your repertoire (I am not talking about

macaroni, three-bean or potato salads here), try a few. They can be a lifesaver (well, maybe only

a reputation-saver) when you have guests coming but your time is at a premium. You can

prepare a full-meal salad the night before to mature and develop to its full flavor by the time your

guests sit down at the table. Work up to half a dozen of these that you can prepare with ease and

on short notice.

Oriental duck salad

The following recipe is a imposing addition to your salad recipe collection. Duck meat

gives this salad a more complex, more aggressive flavor than the more subdued chicken would

with a toothsome texture, since duck is more moist, more highly flavored. Substituting chicken

or turkey meat for the duck, of course, is perfectly fine but expect the salad less inviting. Using

skinless meat reduces the fat content considerably and some of the flavor as well as fat is always

a predominant flavor carrier.

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