Mired in salad doldrums? Green Goddess Julia Sherman shares her secrets in Salad for President

Until recently, I’d always relegated the salad to the status of a sad, feminine, throwaway thing to make or order, lacking substance, heft. And yet, if done well, it can be a transformative experience to eat a salad. The skill to create a spectacular one requires the deftness of a ballerina in pointe shoes. Julia Sherman’s project-turned-book, Salad for President, sought to transform the salad from a side piece to a main chick, center plate.

My perception of salad has been a moldable, lifelong journey. My varying impressions, from childhood to present day: “Salad exists on the boring, diet-friendly, doldrum quadrant of the menu; it appeals to women-people who feign satiation from watery leaves, roughly hewn core chunks and a light spritzing of too-sweet balsamic,” to “salad is sad and challenging,” to—after reading Sherman’s Salad for President—“a grand and jubilant bowl of art, flavor and texture.”

When I discovered Salad for President, a cookbook inspired by artists, I thought: Finally, I will master the art of the salad! That damned, seemingly simple, but actually flummoxing nightmare-leafed and improvisational thing. And I did master it, to a degree. Sherman’s salad headnotes are stories—not too sentimental but smart and succinct, refined, like patent leather flats. And in between are interviews and dispatches from her travels around the world to meet with various artists, activists and guerilla gardeners like the esteemed Alice Waters, beloved Weimaraner photographer William Wegman and punk green thumb Ron Finley. It all gives the cookbook the feeling of actual book—perhaps more worthy of coffee table than kitchen shelf, though it would probably do best simply shuttled back and forth between rooms.

A Manhattanite and daughter of artists, Sherman experimented with mediums as varied as sculpture, silkworms (she raised them and spun their cocoons into thread), film and photography, and even embedded with a community of Benedictine nun-farmers before beginning her blog, Salad for President in 2012 (which eventually resulted in the eponymous book). She’d always enjoyed making salads and entertaining friends and loved ones; she even began growing her own vegetables during college in Los Angeles, after meeting her community gardener husband. But this was a new approach, salad as a medium—a way to combine cooking, writing and photography.