In her book Summer Cooking, Elizabeth David wrote "How one learns to dread the season for salads in England. What makes an English cook think that beetroot spreading its hideous purple dye over a sardine and a spoonful of tinned baked beans constitutes an hors d'oeuvre?"
In the first of a new series on salad, cookery writer Diana Henry makes a delicious vegetable salad for Anna McNamee with not a baked bean or a sardine anywhere in sight.