A universal salad

It’s not quite time for most of the bounty from local gardens to start pouring in (though I’ve been able to harvest some of my lettuce for salads recently), but I’ve been eagerly awaiting the time when the little green tomatoes on my plants are ready to be sliced into salads and sandwiches and the tiny zucchinis can be stir-fried or stuffed and baked.

Two garden staples in the South are tomatoes and cucumbers. It always seems as if someone at work has more of these than they can eat and brings in bags-full to share/force onto gardenless co-workers. When I was growing up in the North Carolina Foothills, we would often have a very simple, undressed salad of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers from our garden as a side dish. Some often-vinegary variation would inevitably show up among the covered dishes for the after-preaching potluck dinner at church on Sundays.

But it’s not just a dish of the American South. It shows up on Indian menus as Kachumber Salad. This is my favorite appetizer at Nawab—light and crisp, savory and sweet, with cilantro and lemon and other herbs I can’t identify. I’ve tried repeatedly to re-create it in my kitchen, using various recipes I’ve found online, but I have yet to really come close to the fabulous taste of Nawab’s.

This past weekend, I made a Persian version—they call it Salad Shiraz or Shirazi—from Robin Robertson’s Carb Conscious Vegetarian cookbook. It was very similar to kachumber salad, but as is usual, each culture often adds its own twist or variation to a dish—for this one, it was the addition of mint. (Of course, individual families can have their own versions, too.) Tomato-cucumber salad is apparently ubiquitous in Russia and can often contain sour cream. The Greek version—Agourodomata—uses oregano. It also shows up in menus in Indonesia (as Acar Ketimun), South Africa and Israel (Pareve), and I’m sure many other countries.

For all the world’s diversity and differences, it’s nice to get a reminder now and then that we also share many things in common—even if it’s just something as simple as salad ingredients.

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