Artful Salads

Preparation

Composed salad. The very name is enough to kill your appetite.

Visions of white-gloved matrons sitting around after bridge eating sliced canned peaches artfully arranged over slivered iceberg lettuce and decorated with cream cheese rosettes.

In the minds of most people, composed salads are antiques from the old-fashioned school of cooking that valued form over function, that was concerned more with the way dishes looked than how they tasted.

After all, why arrange all of those ingredients so carefully if you're just going to toss them together at the table? Along with fluted mushrooms and chaud-froid, composed salads are almost too easy to ridicule.

But let's not be too hasty to poke fun. There's nothing wrong with composed salads that updating won't cure. Like much of classical cuisine, when stripped to their barest components, there is good, sensible food behind the stilted prettiness.

In fact, with good cooks, the decoration never has been the dish's main virtue. In that bible of old-fashioned French cooking, the "Larousse Gastronomique," the name salades composees is translated "combination salads," as opposed to "simple salads," emphasizing the mix of raw and cooked ingredients rather than their artistic arrangement.

Escoffier went one step further, speaking out forcefully against the over-decoration of the dish. "The increased appetizing look resulting therefrom is small compared with the loss in the taste of the preparation," he wrote in "The Escoffier Cook Book." "The simplest form of serving is the best, and fancifulness should not be indulged in." So forget about separating the meat, vegetables and greens into little decorative piles. Arrange them in a more modern, naturalistic way and you've got something delicious that is beautiful without being contrived.

Even better, what you've got is dinner. Because when you get right down to it, a composed salad is the perfect meal for these warm summer nights.

Take a small portion of fish, meat or cheese and arrange it on a colorful bed of vegetables, greens and herbs. Bind the whole thing together with a bold dressing of some sort. What could be better?

Actually, you're probably already making composed salads right now without even thinking about it.

Ever slice ripe tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, decorate it with dark green fresh basil, and then serve it with good olive oil and a loaf of crusty bread?

Is there a better - or prettier - dinner on a sweltering weeknight? That's a very basic example.

How about tossing together canned white beans and tuna? A little olive oil and lemon juice, some sharp bites of chopped red onion, or what about thinly sliced steak and room-temperature steamed potatoes, bound with a mustardy vinaigrette.

Today's salads adapt to what you already have in the pantry and refrigerator.

Canned white or garbanzo beans, tuna and smoked salmon; leftover grilled chicken or steak and the vegetables from a big Sunday dinner.

All you need is some sturdy greens, a good dressing and a few condiments and you're in business.

Because these salads are served at room temperature, it's best to use meat that is fairly lean. So remove the skin from the chicken. If you're using beef, flank steak is always a good choice, as is very thinly sliced skirt steak - the kind that's usually used for carne asada.

Make sure the meat and all the vegetables are cut into bite-size pieces, preferably of a similar size. These salads are about balanced combinations of flavors: Don't let any one ingredient dominate.

The dressing is the unifying factor for composed salads. For lighter combinations, such as tuna and garbanzo beans, a simple mixture of olive oil and lemon juice is all that's needed to point up the flavors.