Warm salads

After the absolutely delicious warm salad I'd had in February at Pearl, I decided to make one for myself on Saturday. After all, how hard can a salad be? All you need is decent ingredients, a sense of composition, a delicate dressing for the leaves and a damn rich sauce for the extra ingredients. What you see in the photo is my truly miserable attempt to ape that style, which revealed to me, as if I had not known it already, just how difficult a classic French-style warm salad is to execute. My mistakes were legion, but here's what I've learned:

1. Don't just go to the market and buy whatever looks good and is in season. That may work if you want to make pasta or a series of dishes, but the composition of a warm salad needs to be very well thought-through indeed.

2. Restrict the number of ingredients you use, or else you will end up with a dish that looks absolutely rubbish, and the aesthetics of the warm salad are a very important part of the dish. For the record, I started with a layer of radicchio, on which were roasted carrots, parsnips and potatoes, with mushroom antipasti, fresh peas and a garlic and shallot sauce made with lots and lots of butter (now that did taste good, as Anthony Bourdain tells you such sauces will in Kitchen Confidential).

3. There needs to be a really good reason as to why the leads you use are not fine, classic, green salad leaves. Such leaves look good, taste nice and work well as a point of contrast with warm additions. Radicchio does not; or, rather, it might work in a simple salad with blue cheese and walnuts, but not with my noisy mess.

4. You must really take care to make sure that each of the component parts of the salad is prepared exactly as you desired. As my picture reveals, I got hasty and served the roasted vegetables before they were relly crunched and caramelised, and I could have done with really making sauce saucier.

5. Use a recipe William.