| All recipes have been approved by the Roadfood.com editors. |
| Ambrosia Coconut
A special-occasion salad, especially suitable for Thanksgiving dinner. This is popular throughout not only the South, but the Midwest as well, where it is also known as Millionaire Salad because of the luxurious nature of its ingredients.
|
|
| Antipasto Platter
No longer need shoppers hunt down a salumeria or pork store in the Italian part of town to find meats for a good antipasto platter. Such once-exotic salamis and sausages are found in many good supermarket deli cases. Of course the best meats are still found behind the counter of true Italian butchers.
|
|
| Antipasto Salad
Chicago likes big salads, especially big salads that have lots of ingredients not normally found in a typical bowl of rabbit-food greens. This one includes virtually all the meats and even cheese from an antipasto platter, plus greens. Make sure all the ingredients are diced very fine. Your goal should be to have nearly some of everything on every forkful.
|
|
| Broccoli Salad
A great dish for broccoli lovers, for here the florets retain their snap and flavor as they are highlighted by a bath of oil, garlic and lemon juice. The peppers and Kalamata olives make it a beauty.
|
|
| Caesar Salad
The reason many restaurants make Caesar salad as a tableside event is that it never should be mixed in advance. If not served immediately, Caesar salad can get watery and its romaine leaves limp.
Caesar dressing is customarily made in a large wooden bowl that serves as a kind of mortar for crushing the garlic and anchovies together. It is also possible to make the dressing separately and combine it with the lettuce just before serving.
|
|
| Coffee Jell-O
Talk about weird! ... and pretty wonderful in an old Yankee sort of way. Durgin-Park, the dowager of Beantown eateries, has been serving coffee Jell-O for as long as anyone there can remember. We guess it was invented as a matter of thrift: why throw away yesterday's coffee when you can make Jell-O from it? It is surprisingly unlike normal Jell-O, just barely sweet and, preferably, with a caffeine kick. Fresh whipped cream is an essential topping.
|
|
| Crab Louie
Crab Louie can be made with any good fresh crab meat (or, for that matter, with cooked shrimp instead of crab), but tradition demands it be made with Dungeness crab from the Pacific Northwest. We concocted this recipe based on the Louie we found long ago at a downhome restaurant called Jerry's Farmhouse in Olema, California. It makes four very large whole-meal portions or 6 modest-size ones.
|
|
| Grilled Salmon Salad
One of the great experiences we've had as food writers is working with John and Laura Wolfe, proprietors of The Cottage in LaJolla, on a book called "Southern California Cooking from The Cottage." The restaurant and the food it serves are California at its best: fresh, outdoorsy, unpretentious, and eminently healthy (but not preachy about it). This is Laura's recipe, about which she noted, "It can be made ahead and assembled right before serving, which makes it great for home entertaining." Be sure to make the dill dressing first! That's Step 6 in the following recipe.
|
|
| Hopkins House Apple Salad
The Hopkins House, famous for old-fashioned, eat-til-it-ouches boarding house meals, is no more. But during our last visit in 2003, we watched Margaret Pope and her son Mike cutting apples into chunks in the kitchen, then later sat down at the lunch table to discover the salad they were preparing. We love this concoction, not only for its brazen sugar content, but as culinary contraband – hail the Maraschino cherry! – and also because it exemplifies the candidly sweet (and canned-ingredient) salad found at so many southern buffet tables.
|
|
| Hot Bacon Dressing
Dandelion greens topped with hot bacon dressing is a true Pennsylvania Dutch specialty. When the dandelion greens are not in season, a nice tossed salad will do. Many people like this salad before a hearty serving of Turkey Pot Pie.
|
|
| Orange Salad
Now run by a third generation of the family that started it in the 1930s, Carbone’s, of Hartford, Connecticut, is a deluxe restaurant, especially in the evening when the dining room is lit up by the pyrotechnics of tableside presentations of everything from steak Diane to bocce ball dessert. Perhaps the best loved dish in the house is Sicilian orange salad, so well-known to regular customers that it isn’t even listed on the menu!
|
|
| Waldorf Salad
Hob Nob Hill in San Diego is one of the most polite, and most delicious coffee shops we know. With dinner, diners get a choice of salad: Waldorf, Caesar, spinach, etc. All come with a chilled fork! This recipe isn't actually Hob Nob Hill's, but it is the traditional way to make this kinda swanky salad, and Hob Nob Hill is all about tradition.
|
|
