Easter Cookbook Special - Salmagundi by Sally Butcher

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With Easter Sunday fast approaching, that all-important family lunch is looming ever closer.  This year, why not give the tired old lamb roast a rest and try reaching for something fresh?  

Salmagundi is the latest offering from Peckham’s own Sally Butcher, and includes a host of variations on the ostensibly humble salad. However, discard any preconceptions you might have about the limits of this much-maligned dish.  As Sally explains, ‘there are no rules’ when it comes to concocting your salad, and the book contains a plethora of exciting new ingredients and flavour combinations to spark your imagination.



Sally Butcher is a well-known name around South London food circles. As owner of Persepolis, the consistently excellent purveyor of Persian ingredients, Sally is one of the most knowledgeable and influential voices on the subject of Middle-Eastern cuisine to emerge online in the last few years. After her earlier volume, Persia In Peckham, was released to critical acclaim back in 2007, hip provincial eateries up and down the country have been tripping over themselves to find space for baba ganoush or ghormeh sabzi on their menus. Sally’s writing is always excellent; highly informative whilst remaining breezily conversational, and Salmagundi is no exception.  Brimming with a frankly astonishing number of recipes, the book is clearly a passion project for Sally. But not only do the recipes shine, the lengthy passages of exposition transform the work into a paean to the egalitarian breadth and versatility of the salad, with recipes to fit every budget.

With chapters on meat, fish, cheese, grains, and a host of other elements, the book leaves no stone unturned in its quest to redeem salad from its prevailing image of limp iceberg and watery tomatoes. Her expert knowledge of Middle-Eastern gastronomy informs the whole book, yet influences are drawn from around the world. Despite taking its name from a 17th Century English word meaning a salad containing everything, recipes and ingredients are drawn from across Europe, Africa and Asia to offer a truly comprehensive spectrum of flavours. Featuring helpful sections on diverse subjects such as urban foraging or tips to grow your own herbs, the book is also a handy do-it-yourself guide for those looking to push their newfound salad obsession that bit further.



In addition to being a truly exhaustive tome, Salmagundi is a refreshingly literary work. Sally consistently inserts quotations from a range of poets and authors to best illustrate her passion and knowledge for the subject, making the work a pleasurable read for both the casual food lover and the confirmed gourmand. Drawing from an extensive range of sources, Sally traces the history of salad making to its earliest origins, and her research sees her including passages from original recipes dating as far back as the 14th Century.  Her own comments are consistently entertaining too; whether denouncing the Romans as ‘the Borg of antiquity’ or skewering the pretences of modern food culture, her prose is never less than first-rate. A definitive yet light-hearted textbook on all things salad and beyond, Salmagundi is essential reading for any foodie.

Pick up your copy here.

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