“This evening they had supped on oxtail soup, summer greens tossed with pecans, grapes, red fennel, and crumbled cheese, hot crab pie, spiced squash, and quails drowned in butter. Lord Janos allowed that he had never eaten half so well.” -A Clash of Kings
Summer Greens Salad w/grapes, pecans, and cheese
Our Thoughts:
There are so many flavors and textures in this salad that it takes one’s brain a while to sort through. The sweetness of grapes and apricot counters the tang of the arugula, while the bite of the fennel gives a flavor that lingers on the tongue. The texture combination of nuts, crunchy fennel, gooey jam, and the pop of grapes will give your palate a great deal to experience.
Recipe available in the Cookbook.
This sounds wonderful; I’ll have to try it this weekend. Although I love pecans, 12 cups sounds like kind of a lot! Should this be 1/2 cup rather than 12? Again, love your site!!!
Just so! Good catch. :)
This salad is wonderful! I made it last night, using praline covered pecans. My fennel bulb was small, I should probably have used more than half. Loved the taste of the apricot vinaigrette with the fennel. Without thinking about it, I bought green grapes so my salad didn’t have the ‘color pop’ of yours, but it was tasty. Next time red grapes! My husband kept going on and on about how good it was; looks like this gets put near the front of the recipe file.
This comment is about the quote more than the salad (though I should make this for my family some time). I noticed in this quote and throughout the books that a lot of the foods, birds especially, are either drenched or drowned in butter. What I’m wondering is was this common in Medieval cooking?
Not that we’ve come across. However, butter is an easy way to make simple dishes decadent, so it is not inconceivable that this approach would have been taken in the Middle Ages. WE certainly like it! :)
The trick to moist roast birds nowadays is to keep basting them in their own fat, as it renders out. Modern birds have been fed corn, and bred to grow quite a bit fatter than medieval birds would have been. It would make sense to add extra fat to a lean bird to keep it juicy, I think.
This salad became an instant favorite, we have eaten it everyday for a week! I even ran out of pecans and had to substitute pumpkin seeds one night and walnuts another. Both made a great alternative to pecans.
Since getting to try this exceptional salad at Pennsic, I’m now planning to make it for the very next potluck I attend. It was so exceptionally good, and I still have a jar of my apricot jam left. Thank you for adding this to my salad options.