Greek Salad, perfect for picnics

The first time I ever ate a Greek salad was at Jimmy’s Seafood Palace in Yorktown, Virginia. I was about twenty years old. Having been from birth a New Englander when I ordered a salad I expected a chunk or two of innocuous lettuce with maybe some tomato and cucumber on it. Instead there arrived an oval platter piled high with concentric ovals of vegetable chunks. No lettuce at all, because of course lettuce hates hot, dry weather and the summers in Greece are hot and dry.

Forever after to me a Greek salad was a salade composèe, as beautiful as it was fresh, large and uncompromisingly Greek. Feta. Kalamata olives. Strong olive oil. For me there is everything right about that list. Fool around with it much and you’ve wrecked a classic. Okay, I haven’t found Kalamata olives here in Città di Castello, but I found Saclà Olive Toste and they are darned close. For the rest of it, if I can’t find good tomatoes, sweet cucmbers, real Feta, I don’t make Greek salad. The world is full of good salads and many of them are also beautiful. Just Google the internet using the phrase salade composèe and you’ll see.

What makes the Greek salad a portable salad is that it is dressed only with oil, so it keeps, You can layer it into a plastic covered box, a bento box or a Tupperware bowl. Add some oil and it’s a salad that can go where you go. Keep it cool, but don’t refrigerate if possible, because the tomatoes hate refrigeration and never completely recover.

Leftovers? Lucky you! They make great summer sandwiches in crusty bread and a whole meal if you scramble a couple of eggs and tuck that in too.

I can’t call this a recipe, but this is what’s in that foto:

The first layer is chunks of ripe tomato sprinkled with coarse sea salt and thin strips of basil. Sometimes I use fresh oregano leaves instead. This I make and leave under a napkin to exude some juices.

The second layer is chunks of cucumber that are partially peeled, then chunked into a bowl filled with ice water. Toss the herbs for garnish in there, too.

The third layer is thinly sliced mild onion. I used the first cipolla rossa di Tropea that I’ve seen at market this year. Lovely, really. Mine did not come from Calabria, but from Puglia next door.

The next layer is Feta, crumbled with my fingers and creating a generous snowcap that reminded me of Kilimanjaro. Why it didn’t bring Olympus to mind I don’t know.

The whole was circled with thin splints of red bell pepper or capsicum. Then the olives most reminiscent of Kalamata were distributed around and some spare leaves of basil fell upon the snowy Feta.

I poured oil from Puglia over it all, covered it with a screen umbrella in case any Greek flies might find my kitchen, then served it up after the antipasto and pasta courses. I think it is interesting that the colors get richer when I photograph food in natural dusk. The tastes were pretty deep and complicated, too.

I serve this as antipasto, as first course, as salad course or as a whole meal when the weather is hot. I ate it every single day when I visited Greece. In Greek cafes they leave the Feta as a whole chunk, but that’s to show you that they are being generous and at home you wouldn’t do that. It’s messy to eat it uncrumbled.

My guests ate this with some homemade flat bread with rosemary that I made and served as antipasto with my olive spread. It went with this salad too. I served bakery bread, but no one was interested and it went back to the kitchen uncut.

There may be things that are nicer than sitting outside of an evening eating Greek salad and drinking wine, but I think when I find them I am probably not going to tell you about them, but keep them to myself. I’m sure they’d be way too emotional for sharing. Feel free to tell me yours, however.