How to Make Salad
Simple dishes like salad are often the hardest to prepare successfully. Anticipating the pitfalls that salad makers can encounter,How to Make Saladprovides useful instruction in succinct form.  In fewer than 100 pages it offers illustrated, step-by-step directions for preparing a wide range of salads and their dressings--recipes, tips, and information that all cooks can use.Beginning with an enumeration of salad basics and a glossary of greens from arugula to totsoi, the book then offers recipes for a wide range of vinaigrette and mayonnaise-based dressings. Master recipes for leafy, vegetable, grain, and main-course salads follow, with variations and related recipes. Thus the chapter for leafy salads offers a formula for a dish of mixed greens, followed by recipes for Asian Baby Greens with Orange Sesame Vinaigrette, Caesar Salad, and Watercress Salad with Pears, Walnuts, and Gorgonzola, among others. Throughout, underlying techniques are explored and illustrated (cutting a large cabbage is a particularly useful one), and sensible tips abound (for example, if you want to keep the peel on potatoes you're going to slice, use a serrated knife).A true primer, the book is part of theCook's Illustrated Library series. Like the magazine, the books are dedicated to presenting tried-and-perfected recipes and cooking techniques in a concise, approachable way.--Arthur Boehm