BLT Potato Salad — Salad Freak (2022)

Millennial hippie-washing, the shadow of Martha, and a July 4th humiliation ritual

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If this has become a safe space to talk about my obsessions, it would be the time to talk about Martha Stewart. While I never “did my time” in restaurants and some may say that affects my credibility as a chef, those people have not been cooking for Martha for over ten years. I have worked with Martha in many different capacities, but one of my favorites has always been making meals for her, especially lunch. It has been during my “Martha Years” that I have been able to really refine my salad making. The lunches I would prepare for Martha became known as my “three-hour salads.” This involved going to the farmers’ market for the best possible ingredients available that day and then preparing each component with more focus and attention than I even knew I had in me. Sometimes she would give me a prompt like, “I’m in the mood for something light and fresh and truly delicious,” or she would bring in pastel-hued eggs from her chickens with the deepest orange yolks I’ve ever seen. My whole morning would be sorting the perfect crunchy inner leaves from a head of butter lettuce, toasting nuts to that just-right golden brown, and creating unique vinaigrettes every day that gave just the right amount of pinch in the cheeks but were bright or creamy, depending on what would complement but not overpower the other ingredients. — Jess Damuck

I am on my way to nicknaming myself a “salad freak.” — Martha Stewart

Jess Damuck is a big reason why I started Back to the Garden. Last year, this little scroll-piggy got fed an Instagram ad for a new cookbook called Health Nut, which was advertised as being influenced by hippie cooking and 1970s California cuisine. I bought the book and was largely impressed by Damuck’s updates on the type of food I was too young to experience firsthand, but feel (as a born-and-raised Bay Area boy) is my birthright, somewhere in my DNA. Some of her prose, riddled with the “it’s so sunny all the time I forget what season it is” clichés of a West Coast transplant, made me a little skeptical of her Golden State bonafides. And some of the recipes — a lentil loaf with smoked soy sauce and panko breadcrumbs, a ‘lemony’ kale salad with crispy chickpeas and avocado — leaned more cheffy Millennial than barefoot Boomer. Leafing through Health Nut made me want to seek out the real things, the vintage cookbooks that reflected the various fads and subgenres of vegetarian cooking over the past generations. But despite my quibbles, it’s obvious Damuck has a genuine affection for this oft-maligned chapter of food history, one that, if people like her (and me) don’t beat the drum, is in danger of being forgotten once the OG hippies shuffle off to that commune in the sky.

Once I discovered that Damuck grew up in the Hamptons, her whole thing started to make sense. And once I read she had worked for Martha Stewart for over a decade, I began to see Health Nut as an attempt to subconsciously synthesize her own inner hippie with her lived experience working for the woman, who, more than anyone else, attempted to eradicate the counterculture from her generation’s culinary footprint. The hippie to yuppie pipeline, the protest generation cutting their hair and voting for Reagan, is an over-reported (and oversimplified) chronology. But Martha is the ur-Reaganite culinary star, her seminal 1982 Entertaining (which is being re-released later this year) the bible for Morning in America housewives one-upping each other over quiche and champagne.

So if Health Nut represents Damuck’s Jekyll and Hyde binary, half Martha / half Mollie (Katzen, not Baz), her previous book, Salad Freak, is much more Hyde and definitely more East Coast. I mean the recipes are organized by season, which apparently we don’t have here. And the copy is full of worry, attempts to please the boss with solutions to “light… fresh… truly delicious” riddles given every morning over orange-hued egg yolks and glasses of freshly juiced greens. It’s a testament to Damuck’s talent and masochism work ethic that she was able to amuse the queen over and over again with her baroque, exquisitely arranged piles of veggies. And if they’re good enough for Martha, they’re sure as hell good enough for the rest of us.

my vegan BLT potato salad

I was confident, even cocky, when I walked into the deep-Valley Fourth of July BBQ holding a big, beautiful bowl of Damuck’s BLT Potato Salad from Salad Freak. All you omnivores can find the original recipe here. I veganized it, substituting the eggy mayo for Best Foods’ (we don’t utter the H-word out here, Damuck) Plant Based, and switching out the Oscar Meyer oink oink for some Lifelight Smart Bacon. So hubristic was I, driving up the 170 (I told you it was deep-Valley), that I doubled the motherfucker. The hostess mentioned there would be at least forty people, and the recipe says “serves 6-8 as a side,” so you do the math.

“Won’t they be thrilled, won’t they be honored,” I thought, “that I made the effort to elevate a simple July Fourth side dish by taking a page from a critically well-regarded, recently trending salad cookbook?” “Won’t it be fun, as I’m watching their eyes light up as they shovel piles of vibrantly colored potato salad into their hungry little mouths, to mention ‘this is Martha’s favorite, it was basically invented with her in mind.’”

We picked up John’s friend on the way to the party; a lovely guy but not a cookbook person. He also brought a side, a four-ingredient (cake mix, Cool Whip, cream cheese, milk) “Funfetti Cake Batter Dip” from a blog called “The Chunky Chef.” “Poor guy,” my ego was seriously out of control, “but we’re operating in two different leagues. I hope a few people try his cute little frosting dip so his feelings don’t get hurt.”

My humiliation began after I was offered a Jello shot at the door. “Where can I put the…,” “oh, wherever!” I cleared a few bags of various chips and a plastic clamshell of slightly melted Costco chocolate chip cookies to make room for my showstopper. No one seemed to be eating off plates. After a moment of panic, I found some Dixies buried under the ultra-processed cornucopia. “But, where are the…” John quickly handed me a box of plastic forks. All good, all good. I served myself a big helping of potato salad and worked the patio, hoping to get a few oohs and ahhs at the exquisite beauty on my plate. John’s friend was smart, taking his dip directly to the people, along with a bag of pretzels (sweet and salty, no utensils needed). Maybe I underestimated him.

I mingled, took a dip in the pool, and smelled the burgers (no veggie option 💀) sizzling on the grill. I kept circling back to the potato salad, undented, untasted, and now slightly wilted in the oppressive Van Nuys sun. I saw one guy hesitate at the bowl, looking quizzically before asking, “are those grapes?” to no one in particular and grabbing a pedestrian melon skewer instead. “Are what grapes?” I wanted to scream. “Are you talking about the cherry tomatoes? Are you so blind and moronic to confuse the baby purple heirloom potatoes for grapes?!?” “There are literally scallions and chives covering everything. What psycho would mix alliums and GRAPES?” I drowned my frustration in a black cherry White Claw and went back in the pool.

Was this ego death? Is this what Cheever’s “The Swimmer” (never gonna read it) is about? I bobbed my head up and down, submerging myself into the chlorinated water before jutting out again, hoping for approval, redemption, purification. Out of the corner of my eye I see a group of people in the distance huddled around the Funfetti dip, plunging pretzels into the besprinkled white mass. My husband’s friend, smiling, mouth full, twinkle in his eye, casually shrugs and says, “sweet and salty.”

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