Salad Days: Watermelon and friends, a chilled miscellany

There’s fruit in this salad, but it isn’t a fruit salad. It’s not that can that your mom opened when you were a kid, and spooned some into a bowl, poured over some of the juices from the tin, and finished it with some runny cream.

There is fruit in it, but there are vegetables too – cucumber and spring onion, celery and baby peas in their pods. The fruit components are watermelon, white grapes, and fresh black cherries. Which means that three of the core ingredients are fruit, and four are vegetables. 

Lending an extra salty element is feta cheese. And dressing it up for dinner is a subtle mingling of watermelon juice mixed with high-quality olive oil, and salt and pepper to perk it up.

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How to shape things to make this salad as attractive as it could be? With a salad, this is a question worth giving some thought to. 

I decided to cut the cucumber into slim batons – sticks, you might say – rather than the obvious choice of slicing them into rounds of half-moons. I cut the white grapes neatly in half, and did the same with the cherries, after pulling off their stems and prising out their stones with the point of a small, sharp knife.

The only cooking involved was to blanch the trimmed peas in boiling water for about half a minute, then refresh them in chilled water.

Oh and look, ma – no lettuce.

Tony’s chilled watermelon salad

(Serves 8 to 10 as a side dish)

Ingredients

½ a watermelon

20 white grapes, halved

20 fresh black cherries, stoned and halved

½ a large cucumber, peeled

4 spring onions, diced

2 celery stalks, diced

20 sugar snap peas, trimmed and blanched

1 wheel of feta, crumbled or diced

Watermelon juice

Extra virgin olive oil

Salt

Black pepper

Method

Trim the ends off the peas and pull off any strings. Bring a small pot of water to a rapid boil, plunge the trimmed peas in, blanch for less than a minute, tip into a colander and run cold water through. Drain.

Using a large, heavy chef’s knife, cut the half-watermelon in half. Tip each section on one side and slice each into triangles (more or less) about 1 cm thick. Place each section on its side and, at the rind end, slice straight across so that you have a perfect triangle.

There will be crescents of watermelon flesh in each cut-away triangle – retain these for their juice. Retain other watermelon offcuts too.

Arrange these triangles in rows across a large, flat salad bowl or plate. Don’t worry about the pips; if you start gouging them out, the watermelon will be a mess.

Peel the cucumber and slice it into three or four chunks about 5 cm each. Hold each of these sections cut-side down on a board and slice through into roughly 5ml slices. Lay these on their sides and cut into matchsticks. Put them in a bowl and squeeze the watermelon juice from the cutoffs over them.

Halve the white grapes and the cherries. Discard the cherry stones.

Dice the celery and spring onions. Crumble or dice the feta.

Pour a glug or two of good olive oil into a jug and squeeze in some more of the juice from the watermelon discards. Add a touch of white grape or apple cider vinegar, and add salt and black pepper to taste.

Arrange the cucumber in between the watermelon triangles on the platter, scatter the grapes and cherries over, sprinkle with spring onion, celery and feta. Place the peas here and there.

Drizzle the dressing over. Season with salt and black pepper. Cover and refrigerate. Light a fire and braai something to be served with this cheerful salad. DM

Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the year award, in 2021 and 2023

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This dish is photographed on a platter by Mervyn Gers Ceramics.