We heard about this salad from the Four Horsemen in New York on a radio programme, and as we love dates decided to check it out. We made it for the first time today to serve with our Christmas ham on Christmas Eve and it really is a winner – destined to go onto our festive (and also non-festive) rota. The original recipe went viral – and it seems with a reason. But having tasted it while making, we have adapted the Four Horsemen recipe slightly – adding different dates, and some shallot. We hope you like it!
Ok, it’s a less of a Simple Supper than normally in this series, but we wanted to share it for Christmas. It’s not at all hard to make, just a little more time consuming as there is a lot of chopping. But it’s so good and really worked with the Christmas ham! Also, as a bonus, the Four Horsemen is owned by James Murphy, the frontman of LCD Soundsystem, our favourite band. Thank you James, You Wanted a Hit and you definitely got one with us!
The original recipe calls for about 200g celery per person and about 75g medjool dates each. We used the deglet nour date variety as we prefer them (but any dates will do!). We were doing a large family salad, so did 4x quantity i.e. two heads of celery and about 250g dates. Start by finely slicing the dates on an angle as below:
Next prepare the celery. You also want the celery leaves for this dish, so remove them first. Now slice the celery – you want thin but long pieces, so cut finely on the diagonal as below:
Lemon is also a key component of this dish. We used the juice of two lemons, plus we segmented and chopped the flesh of one more. The latter is fiddly and you don’t need to do it (add more juice instead if you need) but as it was Christmas, and we understand there are lemon pieces on the Horsemen restaurant dish, we put in the effort! If you want to do, cut the lemon into pieces then remove the juicy flesh (taking off or cutting round the skin of each segment) and chop or pull into filaments.
Place the chopped dates in the bowl you will use to serve, add the lemon juice and filaments (if using), plus about two generous teaspoons of chilli flakes (or as much as you like, we would probably add a little more next time), and about a cup or slightly less of olive oil, and stir well to macerate the dates. Next add the celery and season with salt. Stir everything well to combine.
We tasted the mix at this stage and decided that for our taste it needed something pungent-tasting to balance the sweetness – we decided a little shallot, finely chopped, would work and we think it did. We added just less that two banana shallots, very finely chopped. Chop the shallots as you would an onion, see our Tip. Also tear or roughly chop the celery leaves and set aside to serve, and finely chop the mint and add this to the mix. See our herb Tip for details.
Mix everything well. You can get to this stage and then leave the salad to finish later if you wish (which is what we did). To serve, lightly toast the walnuts (about 5 mins in a medium oven 150C, watch them carefully so they don’t burn) and break them roughly into pieces. Stir through the salad, along with the celery leaves. Top with shavings of parmesan – we use a potato peeler to do this. We understand the original salad uses a cheese called piave vechhio but a good quality parmesan is similar and easier to find. Have a little extra shaved parmesan on the side to top everyone’s portion.
We served ours today with homemade ham and bread.
Happy Christmas all, and enjoy!
