The Wilted Salad: Warm Fat on Cold Greens

Adler's treatment of the wilted salad — hot fat poured over sturdy greens, creating a half-cooked, half-raw preparation that is more interesting than either fully raw salad or fully cooked greens — represents her philosophy of the in-between state as a flavour opportunity. The technique is old (Southern wilted lettuce with hot bacon fat is the American ancestor) but her articulation of why it works makes it applicable beyond its traditional forms.

Sturdy greens (frisée, radicchio, kale, dandelion, watercress) dressed with a warm or hot fat-based dressing at the moment of serving, producing a partially wilted texture that is simultaneously raw and cooked — retaining the freshness and bitterness of the raw green while the fat softens the toughest fibres and carries fat-soluble aromatic compounds into the leaves.

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