The eagle-eyed among you will remember that we featured Ella Risbridger in this slot back in June when the food world was abuzz about her Kitchen Book. “Everything about this book is worth it,” notes Nigella Lawson. “Frankly, even if you never ever cook … I love it.” It is not surprising that Ella has been described as “the most talented food writer of her generation”. Her recipes are so inviting, and her style so practical, that we are treating you to second helpings with this quintessential summer salad. The loose inspiration for the dish is, she admits, her go-to Thai order of som tam, or papaya salad – “you can see just how loosely when I tell you that there is no papaya in this at all”.
The Kitchen Book is nothing if not quirky. Including such recipes as crisp soup and Kale Caesar!, it’s divided into chapters such as On the Sofa, With a Tablecloth and On the Floor. This salad is from the one entitled At the Kitchen Counter.
To Ella, this is “peak summer food: zero cooking, one hundred refreshing”. But she says that it’s also good in the dark days of winter, when “I seek the opposite of outside: I seek to feel alive!”
Words by Jane Ferguson
Ella’s herby mango salad
Serves 4
Ingredients
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsps rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 red chilli
2 medium carrots
3 baby cucumbers (or half a big cucumber)
50g green beans
1 long red pepper
300g chopped mango
10g mint
10g Thai basil
10g coriander
1 Romaine lettuce
150g cooked prawns or fried tofu, chopped chicken, crispy chicken thighs, whatever)
30g chopped roasted peanuts
1 lime
Sriracha, if liked
Method
In a much-too-big bowl (it will hold everything!), whisk together the fish sauce, vinegar, and caster sugar until the sugar dissolves.
Thinly slice the red chilli and add it too. (Easy to omit if you’re not a big spice house.)
Peel the carrots and use a julienne peeler to turn them into thin, pretty little strips. Toss the carrot strips into the bowl and let marinate for a minute.
Halve and thinly slice the cucumbers: if you’re using half a big boy, split it in half, and use a teaspoon to drag out the seeds. Discard the seeds, and thinly slice. Toss the cucumbers in with the carrots and stir.
Chop the raw green beans. If you can do this on the diagonal, so much the better. (Do not forget to take off and discard the stringy ends.) Add them to the bowl too. De-seed and finely slice the pepper, and stir the chopped pepper in as well. (This is a good point to stop, this part, if you’re making in advance.)
Finely chop the mango into little dice.
De-stem and finely shred the herbs then shred the lettuce (wash the leaves; stack the leaves; slightly roll the leaves in a bundle; slice the bundle across).
Mix the leaves, the mango, the prawns into the pickled vegetables.
Roughly chop the peanuts; quarter the lime. Divide salad into bowls; drizzle with sriracha, if liked; scatter with peanuts; set the lime quarter at a jaunty angle for individual jaunty squeezes.
Notes
Eat this by itself for lunch!
Eat it with a big handful of cooked vermicelli noodles (very Vietnamese)!
Eat it cold, over hot coconut rice: 200g jasmine rice, 1 tin of coconut milk, pinch of salt, steam until fully absorbed.
If you keep the components separately in the fridge – so pickled vegetables and vinaigrette in one Tupperware, chopped lettuce and leaves in another, prawns in their packet – it is a phenomenal make-ahead lunch for the week.
Feel free to leave out the prawns, which is a mad thing to say about a prawn salad, but is probably how I make it most of the time. Prawns are expensive!
The Kitchen Book by Ella Risbridger is published by 4th Estate (RRP £26; buy it at a discount at the Nerve Bookshop)
Photographs: Yuki Sugiura