Salad Déjà Vu

I just had a potato salad for dinner. Not so satisfactory, for one reason, hard carrot dice and painfully spicy onion slices were in it. And thick block of cucumbers, too. After all, I'm not sure it was really potato salad. It reminds me of my favorite novel, John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure. Of course carrots are the key.

The first mélanges he constructed for us were firmly at the nightmare end of the cold vegetable spectrum, a particularly unwelcome role being played by chunks of beetroot, "a vegetable for which," as my father remarked, "there is no excuse." My mother, a fastidious eater who preferred to avoid "hands-on" engagement in the kitchen, had to be conscripted to coach him through the principles of the assembled salad, starting with dressings. Mitthaug acquired these techniques faithfully, though there was still a sense of their being a dutifully learned set of techniques rather than a fully interiorized program; the absence of shredded lettuce and diced carrots could never be fully relied upon. "How can someone so good produce something so bad? " my mother would wonder, lifting a piece of wilted leaf between dainty fingers.

The Debt to Pleasure (Picador, 2001) p.145-146