A Salad by Any Name

By Caroline Clough in Food on Mar 27, 2006 8:05PM

After last week's adventures in cooking duck, Chicagoist decided that this week we'd do something more simple and familiar. We've seen many renditions of this salad in restaurants and cookbooks, each time with a different name. Sometimes it's called Mediterranean Salad, at other times it's called Jordanian Salad, we've also seen it under the guise of Persian Salad. Chicagoist likes to call it A Most Satisfying Salad ... though we're considering taking the liberty of calling it Chicagoan Salad. No matter what you call the salad, it's a good one and very simple to prepare.

This salad, like all salads, is best when you have fresh, in-season produce to work with. But, alas, it's not quite summer yet, so do the best you can.

What You Need
1 medium to large cucumber
3-4 ripe tomatoes
1/4 of a red onion
20 black olives
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice concentrate (or the juice of one small lemon)
3 teaspoons sumac
Salt and pepper to taste

How You Do It
The fundamental greatness of this salad is its chunkiness. When you get down to it, it's just a bunch of chopped up veggies with some seasoning, so the key is to vary the size of your chops for ultimate salad texture.

The Cucumber
Seed the cucumber before chopping. To do this you cut the cucumber in half then, using a spoon, scoop out the seeds. Then chop away to your heart's content.

The Tomato
Like the cucumber, you must seed the tomato. Chicagoist is still experimenting with the best way to do this. This time around we cored the tomato then gently squeezed the tomato until most seeds had slurped out (yes we mean slurped, that's the sound they made). Chicagoist prefers smaller bites of tomatoes in comparison to the cucumber, but you may do as you see fit.

The Onion
Chicagoist really dices up the red onion.

The Olives
We try to vary the size of the olives.

Combine all these chopped lovelies into a large bowl, and stir. Then add the olive oil, lemon juice, salt (we use about one teaspoon ... sometimes two), about a teaspoon of ground pepper and the sumac. We found our sumac at our neighborhood Persian corner store that has, since our purchase, gone out of business. But we have faith that most Middle Eastern grocery stores probably have this spice. Mix all together and voila! This salad can be served immediately though we recommend letting it sit in the refrigerator for about an hour. This lets the vegetables soak up some of the spices, the sumac especially comes out more with a little marinating time.

Another welcome addition to this salad is freshly chopped parsley, about half a cup will do the trick.