Never cut a lettuce; always break it with the fingers.
Dry the lettuce thoroughly in a serviette or in a salad-basket before breaking.
Make the salad ten minutes before eating it. Neither more nor less.
Do not bother about garnishing the top of a salad; see the ingredients are well mixed. The decoration will look after itself and be much more artistic if left natural than if fussed into geometrical designs.
Make your mixture proportionate to your salad. This is a matter of intuition and experience combined. The test of right mixing is that no fluid should remain at the bottom of the bowl when finally mixed.
The “fatiguing” or turning over and over, that is, the actual mixing of the salad, should be very thoroughly done for just as long as is bearable to the verge of impatience. Rub a crust of bread with garlic or onion, put it in the bottom of the bowl and take it out just before serving. This is a chapon.
The true salad artist will never add any second dose of any ingredient during the process of mixing the sauce. I was once present at a salad duel between an eminent Belgian violoncellist and a British banker. The former was an artist, the latter a well-meaning amateur. They used the same cruet-stand, and during the mixing process the banker politely pushed the oil and vinegar across to the Belgian, who bowed and said: “Thanks. I never add!” The banker appreciated the rebuke and retired from the contest. Both salads were excellent.
The old salad-proverb about the oil-spendthrift, the vinegar-miser, and all the rest of it, is too old to quote, but it expresses a truism aptly enough. Three to one is, according to my view, a fair proportion of oil to vinegar, but this, as indeed most things in this so-called twentieth century of ours, is only a matter of individual taste, and I have no desire to suggest that my opinion should be given the force of law. I have known a salad enthusiast who coated each leaf of lettuce with oil on a camel’s-hair brush, but this I think is an exaggeration of artistry. On the other hand, the wild stirring of dollops of the four condiments in the salad spoon, which is then emptied vaguely into the salad, is childish and inefficient. The Italians have a proverb that runs:
“L’insalata non è buon’ ne bella
Ove non è la pimpinella.”