Salad Is a Myth

Where is the food, Nonna Pell asked, and she held out her hand for my fork. I had come early for a cooking lesson and was eating lunch on the stoop of her building with the bowl open on my knees, and she had come down the stairs with a bag of trash. I told her the food was under the chicken. I handed over the fork, because nobody I know has ever refused her a utensil.

She went through the bowl the way you go through a coat pocket for your keys. Under the chicken she found romaine. Under the romaine was kale, and under the kale were the cucumbers, which had been sitting in dressing since half past ten and had gone see-through. She named each layer out loud as she got to it. When the fork hit plastic she gave it back and picked up her trash. She said she was putting water on. She did not ask whether I wanted pasta, and by the time I finished the cucumbers I could hear a pot filling in her kitchen upstairs.

The salad place two blocks from my office had a line out the door by a quarter to twelve. You chose a base, four toppings, a protein, and a dressing, and the dressing came in its own small cup with its own small lid. Everything went into a clear plastic bowl with a domed top that snapped shut. It cost fourteen dollars and fifty cents, and for five years I bought one most weekdays.

In the fourth year, the man at the register handed me my change along with a paper punch card that had my first name across the top in marker. He had been keeping it for me in a recipe box beside the tip jar. Forty more visits, he said, and the next bowl was free. The card already had a long row of stamps on it, from months I would not have called a habit, and on the walk back I worked out that at my rate the free bowl was about eight weeks away, which I remember thinking was a very good deal.

I carried it back to my desk in both hands, a little out in front of me. I believed that the people on my floor saw a man with a bowl of kale at noon and concluded that he flossed and owned a good knife. I ate it in about nine minutes, scraping the bottom with a fork that was too short for the bowl. At three o’clock I was hungry enough to resent the printer, and I bought a granola bar from the machine by the elevators and ate it in the stairwell so nobody would see.

Years later I asked a woman who sat near me whether she remembered my salads. She said she did, and that the whole floor had assumed I was going through something and had agreed among themselves not to ask.

The last Friday before the holidays, my floor held a potluck in the big conference room. The sign-up sheet on the fridge had two columns, mains and desserts, and somebody had drawn a third one in pen and written salad at the top. I was the only person who signed up for it. I made the salad the night before in a plastic tub from the hardware store, because none of our bowls at home could hold enough for twenty people, and I brought it in on the bus on my lap.

I set the tub down between a tray of baked ziti and a slow cooker of meatballs. The line started at a quarter past twelve and bent around my tub the way water bends around a rock. People reached over the salad to get to the ziti. A man from the third floor borrowed my tongs for the meatballs and took them back to his desk. I stood beside the tub with a stack of paper plates and offered salad to people whose plates were already full, and a few of them took a single leaf, to be kind, and laid it on top of their pasta.

By two the ziti pan had been scraped down to the foil and somebody had unplugged the slow cooker. My tub was still full. A stack of used napkins had been set on the lid. When the woman who organized the potluck came by with a trash bag, she lifted the napkins off and looked at the salad for a while. Then she asked me whether it was mine or whether it had come with the room.

I took it home on the bus. It had been dressed since noon. At the stop on Ash the driver braked hard. The lid came off, and about three pounds of wet romaine slid out of the tub and into the lap of the man next to me. He looked down at it for a moment. Then he picked out a crouton and ate it without looking up from his phone.

The Monday after, I brought leftovers instead. It was two roast chicken thighs on a bed of potatoes, with the pan juices in a separate container so the potatoes would stay crisp until I poured them on. I heated it in the break room microwave, and then, instead of carrying it back to my desk, I sat down at the break room table, which I had walked past twice a day for five years without once pulling out a chair.

The smell reached the hallway before I had the lid off. A woman from the second floor came in to fill her water bottle and asked what that was. I said chicken. She asked whether I had made it, and I said I had made it Sunday and that it was better on Monday. She sat down across from me with her own lunch, a salad from the place two blocks over, in the clear bowl with the domed lid.

I keep a spare fork in my desk drawer. I went and got it, and when I came back I put half a chicken thigh and two potatoes on her upturned lid. She ate them before she opened her salad, and the next Monday she brought a container of rice and beans and slid the lid across the table to me.

Pell does make a salad. She makes it after the main course and never before, in a wooden bowl that has been oiled so many times it has gone the color of a violin. She tears the leaves by hand, usually escarole or whatever bitter green looked good that week, and dresses them in the bowl with lemon juice, olive oil, coarse salt, and a great deal of black pepper, turning everything with her fingers until every leaf shines.

It goes onto the plates you already used. Nobody gets a clean one, so the leaves pick up the last of the gravy. People who said ten minutes earlier that they could not eat another bite will take a second helping, because it is cold and sour after an hour of something rich, and while they are eating it nobody gets up to look for their coat.

Once I wanted to know why she did not serve it first, the way restaurants do. She said she had not been cooking since nine in the morning so that people could fill up on leaves. Then she handed me the bowl and told me to carry it to the table with both hands.

Pell also has a test, and she gives it whether or not you have asked her to. You tell her what you are eating. If you can say it in two or three words, like roast chicken or beans and sausage, you are eating dinner. If what comes out is a list of toppings that ends with a dressing on the side, she will tell you to go find something hot to put under it.

The easiest way I know to pass at lunch is to cook too much at dinner. When I roast chicken thighs I do six, even though there are two of us. A pot of beans and sausage started on Sunday will last until Wednesday, provided Sam does not hear about it. In the morning I fill a container at the stove while the coffee is going, and when somebody at work asks what I brought, I can answer in two words.

None of this means giving up leaves. A handful of arugula next to a pork chop makes the pork taste more like pork, and I will put one on a plate any night of the week. I gave up the clear bowl at noon. I kept one of them, and it holds sponges under the kitchen sink now.

In March, Sam brought a salad to Sunday dinner. It came in a big steel bowl under a dish towel: romaine and radicchio, salami cut into matchsticks, provolone, chickpeas, and pepperoncini, with an oregano dressing already tossed through. He set it on the table between the bread and the gravy without a word of explanation.

I took him into the kitchen. I had been out of the salad business for three months, and I was at the stage of quitting where you want everyone else to quit with you. I told him January was over. I told him nobody at our table was keeping score and he did not have to perform for us. He listened with a piece of salami in his mouth, and then he said he liked salad. He said he had always liked salad. He made this one most Sundays at his place and ate it out of the bowl during the game, with nobody there to watch him do it.

I did not believe him, and I still do not. He had two plates of it that night and took the rest home under the dish towel. He brings it every few weeks now, and Pell has asked him for the dressing recipe, which is more than she has ever asked me. I have not had any. Last Sunday he held the bowl out to me across the table, and I passed it to Maya.