Breadcrumb Trail Leads to Salad

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Photo by Gentl and Hyers. Food styling by Susie Theodorou. Prop styling by Nina Lalli.

A few years ago, I went to Chicago for work. I don’t remember the story I was reporting, but I do remember the salad with breadcrumb dressing I had at Sarah Grueneberg’s exceptional restaurant, Monteverde.

This salad was—and I don’t use this word lightly—revelatory. It is so burned in my memory, I was positive I had a photo to show you. I don’t. Photo or not, I have a cinematic recollection of my seat at the bar, one I was lucky to score as a solo diner without a reservation at one of the city’s most popular restaurants. I recall the Boulevardier I drank. I remember feeling very happy that I was dining alone, which is one of my favorite things to do (especially when you get to expense the meal afterwards, RIP Condé T&E). And I really remember the salad, because it had breadcrumbs in it. Not croutons on it. Breadcrumbs in it.

There’s an antipasto brassica salad on the current Monteverde menu with rye breadcrumb and a peperoncini vinaigrette that I can only imagine is similar to the one I ate that night. (I “can only imagine” because I have no photo, and no notes, and that’s on me.) You might think that bread crumbs would make a salad feel sandy, gritty. What I learned as I chomped my way to the bottom of that bowl was that the breadcrumbs create a fine, but robustly flavored crispy-gone-soggy texture, but on a micro level. They reminded me of garlic-and-butter soaked breadcrumbs on the typical Burgundy escargot: saturated, yet soft. In a salad, they thicken and bind the vinaigrette without diluting its flavor. They soak up the salad’s goodness and hand it right back to you, just like the crust of a baguette dragged through chicken jus would. Bread crumbs, I thought to myself, should be in more salads.

I couldn’t tell ya if I had this magical salad on the trip I took in 2014 or 2019. But I know it wasn’t during my Chicago visit in 2021, because by then That Sounds So Good had been published, and in it is my Monteverde-inspired Fresh Pea and Snap Bean Salad with Bread Crumb Dressing. This is a springtime version of an Italian chopped salad, and you should probably make it right now, while English peas and sugar snap peas and green beans are holding their annual pop-up. Those snappy green things sure do hog the limelight, with their fluffy little tendrils and fleeting seasonal existence. But it’s the three slices of toast, crushed to smithereens and folded into the generously-dressed salad, that I want you to remember. And for god’s sake take a picture—it lasts longer.

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