Salada à Portuguesa

This is the salad I grew up with. The salad everyone in Portugal grew up with. It sat on Avó Leonor's table at lunch and dinner, every single day, without fail. Alface, tomate, pepino, cebola. Lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion. Dressed with azeite and vinegar at the last possible moment.

There's no recipe to speak of. That's the point. You take what's ripe, what's fresh, what the garden gives you. You arrange it on a plate. You bring it to the table with oil and vinegar and let people dress their own. The skill isn't in technique. The skill is in choosing a tomato that actually tastes like something, an onion with bite, lettuce that crunches.

I've watched tourists order elaborate salads in Lisbon restaurants and ignore the salada mista sitting on every local's table. They don't understand what they're missing. When the tomatoes are good, when the azeite is proper Alentejano oil, this simple salad is better than anything you could construct. The juice from the tomatoes mixes with the oil and vinegar at the bottom of the bowl. You mop it up with bread. That's the best part.

At my Mesa da Avó dinners, this salad appears at every meal. Not as a starter, not as a side, but as a constant. Because that's what it is in Portugal. The thing that's always there. The thing you'd miss if it weren't.