In Spain there’s always a salad on the table, but generally it follows a theme: iceberg or cos lettuce, boiled egg, tuna, white asparagus … if you went to my mum’s house you would have a variation on this salad, and if you went to someone else’s house you’d be guaranteed to have something very similar again. It’s a classic, and I love it, but I think it’s fair to say that the table leans towards meat or fish rather than a range of different salads (the Russian salad here, though traditional, can’t really be classed as a salad).

It’s probably for this reason that the salads in this chapter are inspired by what I’ve learned working in London over the last almost twenty years. Some chefs might think that making a salad isn’t important, especially if it’s served as a side. But it’s just as important as cooking what you might consider a typical ‘main’ (i.e. meat or fish), and actually more challenging to make really well.

So what makes a great salad? For me, it’s all about flavour (of course), colour and texture. By texture, I mean the crunch you get from biting down on vegetables, not leaves, and the juice that they release in your mouth. Although teeny little salad leaves look very beautiful, no sooner do you add dressing to them than they wilt. For this reason, the salads in this chapter are fairly low on leaves but big on vegetables.

The way you cut vegetables is so important to the texture of your salad, whether it’s juicy wedges of tomato (see tomato, fennel and avocado salad, here) or crisp half-moons of fennel (see fennel, pear and radish salad, here). It’s fashionable to grate and mandoline vegetables so that everything is very bitty or paper-thin: this looks beautiful but, as with little leaves, once you add olive oil or dressing that’s it. To my mind, there’s nothing worse than an attractive, crunchy salad without enough dressing. When I’m cutting into a piece of chicory (see chicory, anchovy and salmorejo salad, here), I want to be able to dip it in the dressing – this is what will make the flavours explode. A salad shouldn’t be swimming in dressing, obviously, but you should be generous with it – it really does make all the difference.