SUMMER SALADS

In the past thirty years, our attitude towards vegetables (we eat many more of them) and salads (we no longer think of them just as side dishes) has completely changed. Salads, in most British homes, used to be a slice of ham, leaves from a head of soft lettuce (the ones I had as a child were softer and floppier than Little Gems), a halved tomato, a hard-boiled egg stained by a globe of pickled beetroot, and a generous spoonful of Heinz salad cream. The lettuce was the best thing – its rib milky and slightly bitter – but it was a poor plateful apart from that. I regarded it as a duty meal, one that had to be eaten only for the nutrients it provided.

My mother also made ‘chop chop’ salad, which was a mixture of chopped hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes from