Wedge salads sail beyond the iceberg

Striking salads are easy to make and full of texture and flavour

I love salads. What I love about them is pulling a collection of ingredients together and facilitating their friendship by making bridges of flavour and texture between them.

Sometimes there are lots of bridges and sometimes just a few. This train of thought about flavour and texture led me to wedge salads.

Iceberg is a great lettuce to use with intense flavours and thick textures because of its sweetness, crisp bite and juiciness.

The original iceberg wedge with blue cheese and hard cooked egg was a prime example but dropped out of fashion along with iceberg lettuce in the late ’70s when other greens slowly started to become available.

There were those stalwarts (my father was one of them) who bucked all trends and for them, iceberg never went out of fashion.

It slowly crept back and wedge salads started popping up in what could have been an ironic — or maybe it was a rebellious — statement.

Oh iceberg, we turned our backs on you 30 years ago, then ran to you with open arms once we had our fill of arugula, mizuna, mesclun mix, spring mix and baby kale. Such is the fickleness of food and fashion.

Iceberg versions of the wedge are plentiful, and I wondered what else could be wedged for a salad.

Radicchio would be good and I thought of cabbage and toyed with the idea of a coleslaw wedge. I settled on napa cabbage (a.k.a. Chinese cabbage or sui choi), which is easier to eat and delicious seared. Watermelon can also be wedged and is great as a salad.

And here’s where we get back to the bridges. Radicchio is bitter and soft; napa cabbage is slightly sweet, sharp and juicy; and watermelon is all sweetness and juice.

Salty, sour and creamy is a good bridge for all of them to connect with the other ingredients. Add nuts for crunch, other complementary ingredients, an intensely flavoured dressing and a sprinkling of cheese.

I still enjoy the classic style of wedge, smothered in blue cheese dressing and would like to thank the person who first made it. I’m glad that the wedge lives on.