Dan Pashman: A couple months back, I was in L.A. and I met my friend and pasta fairy godmother Evan Kleiman for dinner, she’s also the host of the radio show and podcast Good Food.

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Dan Pashman: And we went to this place Pijja Palace that I’d been dying to try. It bills itself as an Indian American sports bar. So there are tons of TVs showing different games, and bar food with Indian and Italian influences — so think pizza with chutney on top, onion rings made with dosa batter, pasta with Indian spices.

Dan Pashman: So we order all of those items, because those are the dishes I’ve heard that you have to try at this place. And then at the last second, Evan adds one more item to our order: a Caesar salad. And I had heard all about the pasta and pizza and onion rings at Pijja Palace — nobody ever talked to me about the salad. Evan, who had been there before, said she’d never had it. So her snap decision to order it sort of surprised both of us. Then the salad came, and we went from surprised to blown away. Here’s Evan:

Evan Kleiman: This was just so from out of left field .... A banger! I mean, it was incredible!

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] So, on the menu, it just said Caesar salad.

Evan Kleiman: Exactly.

Dan Pashman: So we ordered it knowing nothing more than that. We assumed just knowing what Pijja Palace does, like, oh, there's going to be some kind of, some kind of a twist. So, producer Emma Morgenstern reached out to Pijja Palace. We got some information back from them about exactly what's in this salad. It's a pickled mango caesar. And you and I both kind of thought there was mango pickle in there. That, to me, was really the absolute home run twist. So, Evan, describe mango pickle and, like, what that contributed to this Caesar salad.

Evan Kleiman: It's like an umami filled condiment that is made with unripe mangoes. So a lot of people hear the word mango and they think sweet. But this is more savory and yet it has that interplay of a tiny bit of sweetness and heat.

Dan Pashman: And it’s tart!

Evan Kleiman: Very tart. 

Dan Pashman: It’s like pucker your lips tart.

Evan Kleiman: 100 percent. 

Dan Pashman: But it also featured chaat breadcrumbs with sun dried tomatoes and parmesan cheese. Beyond that, just big picture, Evan, like, what made this salad special?

Evan Kleiman: A Caesar … you need to really hit the right proportion. If it's underdressed, you don't get all the flavor that you expect from a Caesar that you want the lettuce to be a vehicle to bring to your mouth. If it's overdressed, it's just — you can't enjoy it. It becomes a soggy mess. And this was just perfect!

Dan Pashman: Oh my God. I'm about to get on a plane.

[LAUGHING]

Evan Kleiman: I'll send you ... I'll send you a video of me eating it. 

Dan Pashman: Well, that's not going to help!

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: That was a hall of fame ordering audible, Evan.

Evan Kleiman: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: This is why ... This is why you're such a pro.

Evan Kleiman: I had no idea! You know, I had never ordered that in every other time I've gone there.

Dan Pashman: Right.

Evan Kleiman: And I'm sure that now that we've had this conversation, I will be doing that in the next 48 hours!

[LAUGHING]

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. Now while back I was out to lunch with Sporkful managing producer Emma Morgenstern, and our EP Nora Ritchie, and we were at Shuka, a Middle Eastern restaurant that’s one of my very favorite spots in New York City. And when I go to Shuka, their fattoush salad is an absolute must order. I’ll tell you more about it later but at that lunch, I realized just how few must-order salads I have ever encountered when out to eat. I mean, think about it: Pretty much every restaurant has salads, right? And yet, how often do you get really truly excited to eat one? How often do you have that experience like Evan and I had where the salad is the thing you’re still talking about weeks later?

Dan Pashman: The salad landscape is a barren frontier of half-assed Caesar salads, tired house salads, mushy chopped salads, and sad desk salads. Too many chefs put salads on the menu out of obligation. And too many of us are ordering them, or making them at home, for the same reason. Whether we’re eating out or staying in, we can do better. So today on the show, we're gonna talk with two salad luminaries about how they got to where they are today, and how we can all up our salad games. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: First up is Ayesha Nurdjaja. She’s the chef and partner of the New York restaurants Shukette and Shuka, where they have that fattoush salad I told you about. When I met up with Ayesha at Shuka a few weeks ago,  I asked her: Why are there so few must-order salads out there?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Salad’s one of those things that, like, kind of gets pushed by the wayside sometimes. You're like, if you have a good vinaigrette and some lettuce, you can call it a day. But I think salads could be so much more than that. I think times are changing, obviously, and salads are getting the spotlight, for a while now. But before then, it was like something that you had to eat. Well, the word "salad" to me is like synonymous with like Weight Watchers. You know?

Dan Pashman: Right.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Like, you're eating a salad because you have to get the greens in, but not because it's something that you want to enjoy.

Dan Pashman: Right. And like, from a chef's perspective, like, when you design a menu, how are you thinking about how the salad fits in?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I think, I kind of think about seasonality first, and I think about, like, what are we trying to express here? So the lettuces have to be, like, really good. They have to be in season, they have to be crispy, they have to have some flavor. But sometimes salads could be things with fruit in it. Or it doesn't have to be leafy greens all the time. So I think I don't really have the direct approach of like, we have to have a leafy green salad on the menu. Like at Shukette, we have a cherry salad on the menu right now, that are cherries with serrano, cilantro, lime juice, and sea salt.

Dan Pashman: Oh my god.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: And a bowl of like, savory cherries. 

Dan Pashman: Are they sliced? 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: They're cut in half and pitted. But like, is that a salad? I don't know. To me it is, but maybe not, right?

Dan Pashman: I think it's a fruit salad.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Okay. 

Dan Pashman: I'll give it to you. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Okay, I'll take it. 

Dan Pashman: Sounds phenomenal. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yeah, it's really good.

Dan Pashman: Ugh, I want to eat that now.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: To me, the thing that makes salads appealing is the texture. You have to have the crunch, right? You have to have soft herbs. You have to have something in there that excites you. And I think when those things kind of hit their harmony, that's when a salad really sings.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Because Shuka is a Middle Eastern restaurant, a lot of people assume that’s Ayesha’s background, but it’s not.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: So I'm half Italian, half Indonesian — not Middle Eastern at all. And I've always had like an affinity towards Middle Eastern food. My dad was Indonesian and I like to say that I grew up with turmeric in my baby bottle. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] He would be making like fish head soup and the smell of coriander or lemon thyme, like kind of lemongrass, is always like ingrained in me. But the truth is that my grandmother was first generation Italian from Cobble Hill.

Dan Pashman: Originally, an old Italian neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yes. And she didn't really believe in refrigeration and we used to shop every day. She used to go to Paisano and the fruit store and she was an adventurous woman in her own right. And she used to take me to Damascus and we used to get like a little treat there. Maybe something with …

Dan Pashman: It's a Syrian bakery in the neighborhood.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yes.

Dan Pashman: Which is still there. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: They used to have pita. Yes. Amazing pita. They have hummus that's in the case, that's like one of the best that I'll ever buy. Their spicy one is pretty awesome ... Date cake. And every now and then they used to have shawarma.

Dan Pashman: Mm.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: And we used to taste that. And then we used to go to Sahadi's which was really — like, I guess normal kids like Toys “R” Us [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] But Sahadi’s was like, my Toys R Us. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] That's like a Middle Eastern spice market in the same area of Brooklyn where you grew up. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yeah, and the beauty of that store was it was kind of like an apothecary. They had these huge glass jars and in them there would be anything from like elephant garlic to gummy bears to feta cheese. So we would just taste all of these, like, unusual things. And that to me was like, what Middle Eastern food was. And when I got old enough to travel, I just loved the convivial style of eating. I think that there was a parallel between — you know, my family was from Southern Italy, and olive oil, what's in season, and salt. It's kind of the three elements of any good dish.

Dan Pashman: Despite this early love for Middle Eastern food, Ayesha started off cooking in Italian restaurants. But when she linked up with her business partners at Shuka, they encouraged her to experiment with whatever style of food she wanted to make. Shuka opened seven years ago.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: There was something about when I started to cook this cuisine that I felt like I had come into my own. And I've worked for a lot of great Italian chefs in the past, and this is — I don't want to say that I'm self taught, but I never worked in a Middle Eastern restaurant before I opened one. And it was kind of — it's been like a burning fire for me, and something that I've just been kind of on this path and so happy to do. 

Dan Pashman: Tell me about the genesis of your fattoush salad.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: We started the menu saying, like, "What do we have to have?" And we had to have, like, a chicken, right? You have to have a steak.

Dan Pashman: Right.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: And then you have to have a salad. 

Dan Pashman: In other words, like many chefs putting together menus, and like many home cooks planning dinner, Ayesha felt obligated to have a salad. But instead of seeing that as a burden, something to check off the list, she saw it as an opportunity.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: So what salad are we gonna do? So I think the first salad that kind of came to my mind was kind of like, you know, a Shirazi salad or Israeli salad where the tomatoes and the onions and everything's chopped up with cucumbers very fine. But I'm, like I said, a textural eater, so I wanted to come up with something else. So I took inspiration from a fattoush salad, and I think the definition of a fattoush salad is that it has to have, usually these are the suspects, I should say, herbs, there's some kind of crispy pita in there, there's nine out of 10 times always radishes, and then lettuce chopped or whole. And I said, "How could I make that my own?" So we started with the lettuces, we started with radishes, tomatoes, red onion, and we toasted pita chips a plethora of ways and then we winded up like spiking it with lots of za'atar. But the real key component was the fried halloumi.

Dan Pashman: Yes, the fried halloumi cheese. Halloumi is a salty, dry, firm cheese that you can put right on a grill, or in Ayesha’s case, cut into cubes and drop right in a deep fryer. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Everybody always thinks that we're coating it in like cornstarch or something, but it literally is the cheese in the fryer.

Dan Pashman: And these cubes are big — I’d say each one is almost the size of a Rubik’s cube. And each salad comes with four of those giant fried cheese cubes, each one dark golden brown and crispy, crackly on the outside, tender on the inside. When I eat this salad, every morsel of halloumi is precious. You know, you want some in every bite. So as I told Ayesha, I’ve put a lot of thought into how I portion it as I eat.

Dan Pashman: How many pieces do you think is the ideal number to slice up one of your cubes of halloumi into?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: So I think my math works like this. The first piece you have to bite into, so you bite it in half. You have to get that feeling and the texture and the kind of, like, the gooeyness in the inside. And then I like to cut the second piece in half and the third piece in thirds and then I quarter the fourth.

Dan Pashman: So you, like start off with just an incredible huge bite of pure fried halloumi. [LAUGHS]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Monster bite. Monster bite. I go right in.

Dan Pashman: And then you sort of like go smaller and smaller.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yeah. The first bite is with my hands.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Then, I, unfortunately, I'm in the restaurant, I gotta pick up a fork and knife, and then I just cut it in like various pieces. Sometimes I want to make like a mini halloumi and pita sandwich with red onion. And I think that's the beauty of the fattoush is that like every bite is kind of different.

Dan Pashman: Right. There's so much going on. In my research, I have decided — I typically cut the cube into thirds.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Okay.

Dan Pashman: So the four pieces into thirds gives you 12 pieces of halloumi, and I can usually get most of the salad in 12 bites.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I love that. So, wait. ...  

Dan Pashman: I like a lot of greens in a bite. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Are you doing it in slices? So you have, like, two ends and a middle? 

Dan Pashman: No, I'll usually do, like, somewhat oddly shaped diagonals.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Okay.

Dan Pashman: So I'll take, like, off a big corner and then I'll — and then the remaining two-thirds cut in half cause you want some edge. You want edge in all of it.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: That's it. That's what I'm saying. So now it makes the most sense. 

Dan Pashman: This is not my first rodeo, Ayesha.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I see it! I'm being schooled right now on my own salad. 

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: But I like a lot of greens, but I stabbed the greens first. Then the halloumi's second, so the halloumi's on the tip of the fork, [Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yeah.] so that lands on your tongue and you taste it more.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I love it. 

Dan Pashman: And then you chase it down with greens.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I love it. You're giving me an insight of, like, inside your brain.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Like, your forehead right now is transparent.

Dan Pashman: I know, right!

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I can see, like, all these halloumi molecules going through.

Dan Pashman: There's graphs and pie charts and protractors ...

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Exactly.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: You came researched and ready for this for sure.

Dan Pashman: Yeah!

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: So, clearly, I love Ayesha’s fattoush salad. I love halloumi so much that there’s a recipe in my cookbook for a pasta salad with corn, avocado, and fried or grilled halloumi — you get to pick how you want to cook it. But as I say to her, setting aside the halloumi for a minute, there must be some general things I can do in my own kitchen to improve my salads …

Dan Pashman: … like, maybe I'm lazy with my greens or I don't know the dressing recipe ...

Ayesha Nurdjaja: If I’m at home, I think things that I always gravitate towards are in my salad is like pepperoncini.

Dan Pashman: Mmm.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I like things spicy.

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Chickpeas ...

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Are also great. I mean, I couldn't live without red onions. To me, they're like apples. So I have to have that. And I think that if you think about like vinaigrettes, I mean, lemon juice and olive oil go a long way. If you have a little Dijon and a little bit of honey, maybe black pepper — now you're fancy.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: But like, I don't know. To me, like the vinaigrette could go either way. I love things that are on the simpler side. You know? Do I want like smashed raspberries or balsamic vinegar? It's not my jam. But I think simple is best with salads. I think it's about combining things that you love, but that they all have a place in it. You know, one thing I think that's really important in all salads is herbs. If you throw a handful of parsley leaves, mint leaves, or the things that you love — I mean the fattoush salad is comprised of like 60 percent lettuce and 40 percent herbs.

Dan Pashman: And it's mint ... What else is on there?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Mint, cilantro, dill, parsley.

Dan Pashman: And it's big pieces, it's not like finely chopped. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: No chopping, no knives. 

Dan Pashman: You're getting mouthfuls of fresh herbs. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: You are. Basil goes bad so quickly.

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: So if you're not gonna use it all, basil leaves in salads are, like, phenomenal. So, I always try any herb that I have in the house, tarragon, dill, you name it, throw it in the salad. It always, like, brightens it up. So, I think that's, like, kind of, like, lesson one for you to kind of pick up your salad game.

Dan Pashman: Okay. All right, all right. I'm gonna work on it. 

Dan Pashman: At this point, we’ve talked enough about salads. It’s time to make one. Ayesha takes me downstairs to the Shuka kitchen to show me how she makes that famous fattoush salad …

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Carla, this is Dan. Carla's the chef here. 

Carla: Hi, Dan. Nice to meet you. 

Dan Pashman: Very nice to meet you. Do you make the fattoush salads?

Carla: [LAUGHS] We do, yes. 

Dan Pashman: Oh my god. 

Carla: A lot of them, every day.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: I love them, they're so good. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: How many fattoush? 

Carla: A day? About 50 plus, for sure. 

Dan Pashman: 50 plus per day?

Carla: Yeah. Between both services? 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yeah, I think it's more than that. I think it's between like 65 and 80.

Dan Pashman: Carla, what's the secret to making the fattoush salad so good?

Carla: Simplicity. And fresh vegetables, really. It's like, the freshness — thankfully, we like farm to table. And the freshness of the vegetables is really what makes the fattoush salad, the fattoush. And obviously, honey lemon. 

Dan Pashman: Honey lemon. 

Carla: Yes.

Dan Pashman: Is that what the dressing is? 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Honey lemon and olive oil. 

Dan Pashman: That's it? 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: That's it. 

Dan Pashman: No salt? 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Oh, salt. Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Okay.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yes.

Dan Pashman: Right.

[LAUGHING]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: But we don't, actually — we don't season the vinaigrette, we season the salad.

Dan Pashman: Salt directly on the greens?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yes. But not necessarily in the vinaigrette. Are you ready to make it?

Dan Pashman: Let's do it.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: So the first thing we need to do is fry the halloumi. Even though you get served only four pieces, we usually fire five or six pieces just in case. 

Dan Pashman: In case what? 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Something sticks, explodes, you know what I mean?

[FRYING HALLOUMI]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: You shake them a little bit, because you don't want them to stick to the bottom. And that noise is the moisture of the cheese that's kind of, like, dissipating while the outside of the halloumi gets crispy.

Dan Pashman: Very exciting.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: It’s now in the deep abyss of oil. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] And we're gonna come here to make the fattoush salad. 

Dan Pashman: Ayesha fills a mixing bowl with greens, fresh herbs, Persian cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes, which only go in the salad this time of year, when tomatoes are in season. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: And then like any good chef, we never dress the salad, we dress the bowl.

Dan Pashman: She drizzles the honey lemon dressing and olive oil around the perimeter of the bowl, so it seeps down under the veggies, then uses her hands to gently toss everything together. She says this prevents overdressing and keeps the greens from wilting, because they aren’t sitting with a bunch of dressing on top of them. She adds crumbled za’atar pita chips, and then …

Dan Pashman: Now for the piece of resistance. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: That's it. 

Dan Pashman: Oh, look at that. Deep fried cubes of halloumi cheese.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: We’re gonna take the halloumi .... So, one, two, three, four of, like, halloumi heaven. It's like a meteorite of halloumi.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: Oh my god. How is it?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Want me to feed you?

Dan Pashman: Yeah. Bring it on. Mmmmm!

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I mean, you can't beat that.

Dan Pashman: Oh my god, it's so good! I'm just gonna ... I'm just gonna compose it with my fingers.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Go right ahead.

Dan Pashman: How do you feel about people eating salads with their hands, Ayesha?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: It's my favorite thing in the whole world.

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: I would eliminate any fork and knife and eat it with my hands all the time.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] So I'm gonna ... I'm gonna actually make a little sandwich with a cube of halloumi. I'm gonna break it in half. 

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Yup. Wow.

Dan Pashman: I'm gonna put a leaf of lettuce on the top and bottom with a halloumi in the middle. I haven't tried this technique.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: All right.

Dan Pashman: I'm experimenting.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: Before you said ...

Dan Pashman: But I need some herbs though. I need some more stuff in here, right?

Ayesha Nurdjaja: You do. You do. Yeah, you gotta get that red onion in there. 

Dan Pashman: Once I have all the components together in my fingertips, I shove the whole thing into my mouth.

Ayesha Nurdjaja: He's all in, ladies and gentlemen.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: He is knuckle deep into the salad.

[LAUGHING]

Ayesha Nurdjaja: The halloumi has won his heart. Fattoush for life.

Dan Pashman: Oh my god. Best salad in New York, right here. [LAUGHS]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: That’s Chef Ayesha Nurdjaja, of the restaurants Shuka and Shukette in New York City. If you go, definitely get the fattoush salad. You also have to get the labne, which inspired the tangy noodle kugel recipe in my cookbook. And one more tip, if you get the ras el hanout chicken, which you should, you absolutely must drizzle the white sauce and the zhoug, which is the green sauce, on every single bite. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, we chat with Emily Nunn, the self-appointed C.E.O. of Salad at her very popular newsletter, The Department of Salad. Stick around.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Maybe I’ll take one more pita chip.

MUSIC

 

+++ BREAK +++

 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. I am getting ready to pack my bags to go to London, September 14th — a live show at the London Podcast Festival! My first ever international live show. And I'm super excited to be chatting with comedian Ed Gamble, who you know from the Off Menu podcast and the book Glutton. He's gonna be great. It's gonna be a ton of fun. Get your tickets now, seating is limited. 

Dan Pashman: Also, there's only two spots left on my pasta tour of Italy in November! So go to sporkful.com/events for more information about the London show and the Italy trip. Hope to see you there! Again, that's sporkful.com/events.

Dan Pashman: Okay, back to our celebration of salads. Now we turn to Emily Nunn, who’s become a major voice in the salad world over the last few years. In fact, as I confirmed with her …

Dan Pashman: And am I right, from what I saw on Substack, you're currently the number eight food and drink newsletter on all of Substack?

Emily Nunn: Yeah, I got ... I got bumped. I got bumped by some damn TikTokers.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: You were what? Number six before.

Emily Nunn: Yeah, I was five for a long time and then I dropped to six and now I'm eight ...

Dan Pashman: All right.

Emily Nunn: And it's like ... I mean, these are like these incredibly talented, you know, young kids who are doing meal plans for a week and they're great ... Those little shits.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: Emily’s very popular Substack is called the Department of Salad, and she’s dubbed herself the Salad C.E.O. She sends out two newsletters a week, each with an essay and a salad recipe. People love it for the recipes, of course, but also for Emily’s writing. She writes about growing up in the South… or about AI and robots and going to Mars. She’s self-deprecating and precise and silly. She once compared herself to the American Pygmy Shrew, an animal that dies after an hour without food. [LAUGHS] She’s compared her fridge to a “forgotten museum on a side-street in a third-tier city, scruffy and overcrowded.”

Dan Pashman: But despite the fact that the writing in her newsletter often has little to do with salads, Emily says some people don’t totally get her.

Emily Nunn: You know, it's funny people are always like we are a salad expert and I'm not a freak. I'm not like ... I don't have like a salad bed, you know, and a salad hat.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Emily Nunn: You know what I mean?

Dan Pashman: You know, you don't sleep on a bed of lettuce.

Emily Nunn: Right, exactly.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Emily Nunn: And I think people … Like, I really don't like go to bed at night and dream about salad. I think about it a lot and I do love it. But what I like about doing this is that I'm not trying to be an expert. I'm like a salad pilgrim, you know, on the path to, like, enlightenment that I know is never going to come.

Dan Pashman: You're a salad seeker, Emily.

Emily Nunn: Exactly!

Dan Pashman: So Emily is always on the lookout for exciting new ideas in salad. But what she’s really more of an expert in is writing and editing. She grew up in Galax, Virginia, right by the North Carolina border. She moved to New York in the ‘80s to work in magazines, where she landed a job as a copy editor at The New Yorker. She began doing some writing too, and even co-created The New Yorker’s Tables for Two restaurant review column, which is still a feature of the magazine today. Eventually, she decided she wanted to focus more on writing, so she took a reporting job at the Chicago Tribune. 

Dan Pashman: At the Trib she started another restaurant review column. But then, she realized something …

Emily Nunn: I've never really enjoyed making an assessment of something. I'm more interested in sharing what something is like. And so, doing, even, mini reviews, which is usually what I did for, you know, most of my career, I just — I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. [LAUGHS] You know? I didn't want to — like, this play was terrible, but they were so nice. The people are really nice in this play. You know, that was kind of my attitude. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: So Emily moved from restaurant reviews to the cooking section. And she fell in love with working on recipes, testing them out, and writing about them. It felt like she’d found a new calling.

Dan Pashman: But then a string of terrible things happened. In 2009, she got laid off by the Tribune. Shortly after, her brother died by suicide, and her partner left her. She spent time in rehab to help her quit drinking. Emily struggled for several years. Finally, to process everything that had happened, she decided to do what she did best: write.

Dan Pashman: To do that, she decided to make a big life change: She moved to a barn in rural North Carolina, not far from where she grew up. Emily wrote a book that came out in 2017 called The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart. The book was very well-received, but it didn’t make her a ton of money. So she needed to find work again.

Emily Nunn: So I’m in this barn, literally 35-40 minutes away from a grocery store, and I start applying for jobs. And people whose homes I had been in did not respond. And I didn’t realize that I had essentially aged out of my career. I was 56-years-old. And first, I couldn’t believe that just because I’d gotten older, my talents were no longer … It’s like they just disappeared.

Dan Pashman: Now, it’s not like anyone ever came to Emily and said, we’re not hiring you because you’re too old. But this was 2018, a pretty good time for food media when folks were hiring, and Emily had a very good resume. It seemed strange she would have such a hard time getting a job. She was convinced it was ageism. 

Dan Pashman: So, she took to Twitter to rail against ageism. Her screeds made her a minor internet celebrity, especially in food media. But in between rage tweets, she was doing something very different, inspired by her rural surroundings at the barn.

Emily Nunn: I had a blackberry guy. And I would literally drive past his his house and he would come with baskets of blackberries, and I got my peaches at a farmer's market and then I have my crappy grocery store. And I was making these salads with just greens in the bottom and sliced peaches, sliced plums, maybe radishes and cucumbers, red onion, and just like eat these things that were like — for me, it was like eating the earth. They tasted so good and it was so fresh. And I would post them on Twitter and people would, you know, say, "Oh my God, I have to have that." And so I just started posting them regularly and I called them something like "Another goddamn salad."

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Emily Nunn: And you know, here's, here's my goddamn salad.

Dan Pashman: Just as Emily’s followers began asking for more salad content, the pandemic hit. People were starved for connection, for things that either made them feel good or helped them commiserate. Emily’s salads, and the ways she mixes biting humor with nostalgia in her writing, did both. And it wasn’t just for her followers, but also for Emily.

Emily Nunn: I couldn't get how beautiful it was around me close enough. You know, like I could see it, but you know that feeling, like when you're with somebody you love and you can't get them close enough? That's the way I felt about the world at that point, humans and the earth itself. And these salads made me feel like I was eating something beautiful.

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Dan Pashman: So since it seemed the world of food media wasn’t going to hire her, Emily decided to break out on her own. In October 2020, she launched the Department of Salad newsletter, which would combine both her own creations, and salads from cookbooks and other food writers that she really liked.

Dan Pashman:The first featured salad was from the famous Moosewood cookbook that was updated in 2020 by author Mollie Katzen. The recipe is essentially cottage cheese mixed with a bunch of chopped fresh vegetables and herbs, and sprinkled with nuts and seeds. Other early salads were equally mold-breaking, like a recipe for squash preserved in oil. There were more traditional ones too, like a really great Greek salad, and an egg salad.

Dan Pashman: That very first newsletter also included Emily’s salad manifesto, which now lives mostly unaltered on the newsletter’s About page. It reads in part: “We at the Department of Salad do not by any means consider salad a “diet” food, so get that out of your head this instant.”

Emily Nunn: It offends me that a salad is something that people have to punish themselves. I'm gonna have a salad. It's like, or men mostly, I think it still has the attachment of diet food.

Dan Pashman: Right, I feel like a lot of people are guilted into making and eating salads.

Emily Nunn: What you eat, how many calories you take in, that's your business. That's .. That has nothing ... I'm about delicious. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Right.

Emily Nunn: I'm not about ... But it still has that stigma very much So, I mean, I like have these people never met like a Cobb salad or pasta salad? I mean, you get all your calories in a day in a Cobb salad.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] Right, but also I think that maybe because of that idea that salads are meant for people who are concerned with dieting or how many calories they're consuming, I think that also makes a lot of chefs not care about them.

Emily Nunn: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: Like it is so rare that I go to a restaurant and see a salad on the menu that I would be excited to eat.

Emily Nunn: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: I mean, if I see another beet and goat cheese salad, Emily, [EMILY NUNN LAUGHS] I am just going to lose it!

Emily Nunn: We got stuck in the beet and goat cheese. 

Dan Pashman: Oh, what? There's pistachios on this one. Wow!

Emily Nunn: [LAUGHS] That's exactly it.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Emily Nunn: I think it's changing a little bit, but you're right that for the most part, it's a sad situation. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: What are most restaurants and home cooks not understanding about salad? Like, it feels like it gets short shrift in a lot of places.

Emily Nunn: I think there's this lack of imagination that makes people think of the salad emoji, you know, green leaves, slice of tomatoes, slice of cucumber, a little bit onion, some kind of gloppy dressing. And I can't say that that wasn't my idea of what a salad was when I started out. But saying you don't like salad is like saying you don't like food. Anything in the world can be a salad. And, you know, I had this interview when I first started it, I was getting a lot of press and I can't remember who, a business reporter called me and he interviewed me. And then at the end he said, "So Emily, what are you going to do when you run out of salads?" And I was like, "Salads never end. There's no way to run out of salad." You know, salad is like, you know, jazz or modern dance.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Emily Nunn: There's ... You know? I mean, it's impossible to say what salad is really. I mean, there are grains, there are meat salads, there's tuna ... I mean, my tuna salad newsletters are some of the most popular I've ever done.

Dan Pashman: So Emily, since you bring up tuna salad, let’s take a minute to define our terms. Because there are what some people would call, like a deli salad, like a tuna salad, and you know, shrimp salad, whatever. And then there's pasta salads and that whole universe.

Emily Nunn: Right.

Dan Pashman: You take a very expansive view of the word salad. When you say salad, it's kind of — could be a combination of food of almost anything.

Emily Nunn: Right.

Dan Pashman: So ...

Emily Nunn: Anything that you can eat can be a salad.

Dan Pashman: So is spaghetti and meatballs a salad?

Emily Nunn: Okay. Now, see ...

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Emily Nunn: [LAUGHS] Now, I just ... I just wrote about somebody asked me about my philosophy of salad. And when you get to the pastas, you know, like the idea, "Can a salad be warm?" Of course, it can, but not pasta salads because that's just pasta.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Emily Nunn: You know, it's like when you get to pasta, it either — it has to be cold. And then I seriously think that's my only rule. If you said to me, Emily, I have this tater tot and Snickers and orange section salad and everybody in my family loves it, I would give you a medal. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHING] You know? I would write an entire piece about you and I would congratulate you. I would put you on my shoulders.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] So what's the example of like a warm salad that doesn't veer into being some other dish?

Emily Nunn: Like a warm mushroom salad. 

Dan Pashman: But it sounds like the idea — a warm salad is kind of an exception. I mean, there's not that many things that would be served warm that you would say are a salad.

Emily Nunn: You know what? I'm going to have to get back to you on that because I think I could probably find hundreds of them.

Dan Pashman: All right! [LAUGHS] I'm with you, Emily, in general, on the idea of a very broad approach to salad. And I think that's great. I think — I actually debated this years ago with, with Justin Warner's on Food Network, but his definition, which I think is pretty good, was that it's the ingredients are served colder — a room temperature. They can be cooked, but they aren't all cooked together and that they have to be dressed.

Emily Nunn: That sounds good. I like the idea of the separateness of the elements.

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Emily Nunn: Lots of different things that might not go together until you put them together and dress them.

Dan Pashman: However Emily is defining salad, she’s been very successful at it. In the four years since she launched her Substack, she’s amassed 67,000 subscribers, a mix of paid and unpaid. And as you heard at the beginning of our conversation, it’s #8 among all food and drink newsletters on Substack. As I said, some of the recipes are hers, others come from cookbooks she likes, or through recommendations from friends in food. 

Dan Pashman: You have one that you're featuring recently that looks amazing. Tell me about this mozzarella, cherry tomato and cantaloupe salad.

Emily Nunn: That I just ... I had this cantaloupe and it was so juicy and so good. I always buy too many cherry tomatoes. Alison Roman did a great cantaloupe, I think, and black olive and arugula salad that I just flipped out over. So I knew that I wanted just to keep it really simple because I get overwrought a little bit sometimes. So, I just piled it up together and then I remembered Alison's recipe, so I dressed a little tiny salad of arugula with the lemon and salt and pepper, and I just love those textures together, and that's something I think that people forget about how good a simple salad can be. When you bite into the milky mozzarella and sweet cantaloupe and then the, you know, pop of — like that really acidic pop of tomato, you don't need — it didn't need a dressing. So I just drizzled it with a little olive oil, lemon juice. But that was just, you know, plucking influences from other salads that I've had and really liked.

Dan Pashman: Right. Your salads are standing on the shoulders of the salads that have come before.

Emily Nunn: Exactly.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Beyond deliciousness, Emily’s newsletter has also given her career a new chapter. She says she’s making more money now than she ever made in traditional journalism.

Emily Nunn: Substack has changed my life. When media started, you know, kind of like, is it still going to be here, if I had gone to a magazine editor, or a newspaper editor, or an editor at a publication that I was working with, and I had said, I have this great idea. I want to do a weekly column about salad. No way.

Dan Pashman: Right. First of all, they would have thought that's going to last three weeks and it's going to get old.

Emily Nunn: That's right.

Dan Pashman: And they would have thought nobody cares that much about salad.

Emily Nunn: That's right.

Dan Pashman: Salad is boring. People only eat it because they want to be healthy.

Emily Nunn: That's right.

Dan Pashman: There would have been a million reasons why you got shot down.

Emily Nunn: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: Because a magazine to be successful has to support the infrastructure of a large business.

Emily Nunn: Right.

Dan Pashman: Whereas you're able to do this newsletter, you're a company of one and you don't need millions and millions in your audience to be able to make a decent living.

Emily Nunn: Right. And I can do whatever the hell I want. I have people who are like, "Oh my God, I love your salad. You've changed my life." Like, I literally have people say, "You have changed my life." Like, "I can't wait to get to your newsletter, it's the one I open first," and some of them tell me that they never make my recipes. Some people tell me, "I don't even like salad," they just want to read my newsletter. And at first, I was insulted, like, wait, you have to.. Like, try the recipe! You know, I'm, like, got a fork. Come on, try a little!

Dan Pashman: Right, right,.

Emily Nunn: You know, like, eat! Eat a little! But, it doesn't insult me anymore because like for whatever reason they come there ...

Dan Pashman: Right.

Emily Nunn: But it really ... It makes me so happy when I think that the idea that I'm getting people to use their kitchens when they didn't, that completely thrills me.

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Dan Pashman: So Emily, on your, on the website for Department of Salad, You promised that your newsletter will be a weekly missive that will inform you about the glories of salad past, present, and possibly future.

Emily Nunn: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: What is the future of salad?

[LAUGHING]

Emily Nunn: [LAUGHS] I wish ... I'm going to go and delete that after we get out of this conversation.

[LAUGHING]

Emily Nunn: Well, I mean, I think, you know, I guess, the idea of salad in the future is like people not limiting what it can be. Anything that you enjoy, like if you don't enjoy lettuce, like just try putting it in a bowl, you know, with some onions. And if you think it would be terrible with fruit, try some fruit in there. I mean, so the things that you think might not fit in the salad, try it in the salad. Like, don't think about the past. Don't think about the lady's lunch and the little side salad. You know, like make yourself the big Seinfeld giant salad and have that for supper and put nuts in it and put cheese in it and put some raisins in there. Go crazy.

Dan Pashman: So I think what you're saying, Emily, is that maybe someday in the future spaghetti and meatballs will be a salad.

Emily Nunn: Well, I think that if you and I got together and started a business [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] and what we call it? We should definitely do a hot pasta salad book. I think that would just make both of us millions of dollars [Dan Pashman: All right, all right!] and we could quit working.

Dan Pashman: Perfect. Sign me up. I'm in.

[LAUGHING]

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Dan Pashman: That’s Emily Nunn. Her Substack is called The Department of Salad — she sends out both free and paid newsletters to her followers. And exciting news: one of the pasta salads from my cookbook, Anything’s Pastable, will be featured this week in the free edition of Emily’s newsletter! It’s the raw heirloom tomato puttanesca with fish sauce and calabrian chiles. This is the dish that Kenji Lopez-Alt said in the foreword is his favorite of the entire book. It’s a raw tomato sauce with an incredibly savory spiciness, so it is perfect this time of year. Head over to emilyrnunn.substack.com – that emily-r-nunn, N-U-N-N, dot-comsubstack-dot-com to sign up, we’ll also put that link in the episode description.

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, I’ll talk with Jameela Jamil, the British comedian and actor who starred on The Good Place, and hosts the podcast I Weigh. Jameela and I have some major disagreements about which foods should be dunked in which drinks, but we also get into more serious questions about body image and how women are treated in media. That’s next week.

Dan Pashman: While you’re waiting for that one, check out last week’s episode about the heyday of celery, when celery was more expensive than caviar. Could the vegetable make a comeback? We investigate. That one's up now.

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