Millionaire's Salad

I have to be perfectly honest: before I started this entry, I had never heard of millionaire's salad. It came to me in a roundabout way. It also as far as I can tell is the most inappropriate name for a dish that I have ever seen, since the ingredients will likely cost you under $10 if you're serving less than an army. But let's backtrack a bit first.

Back in the day, I used to regularly attend wine dinners at the now defunct Judson Grill in Midtown Manhattan. Judson was great, the service was outstanding, and the food was really solid, especially for a place of it's size. I loved ending dinner with a milkshake of vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, seltzer water and a shot of Jack Daniel's. It is porbably my favorite dessert in the world to this day.

Every time I ate ate Judson Grill, there was at least one dish that blew you away, and one such dish was a hearts of plam salad. It was so perfect in it's simplicity, yet so refined. ever since then I have been a fan of hearts of palm.

Heart of palm, also called palm heart, palmito, or swamp cabbage, is a vegetable harvested from the inner core and growing bud of certain palm trees (notably the coconut (Cocos nucifera), Palmito Juçara (Euterpe edulis), Açaí palm (Euterpe oleracea), sabal (Sabal spp.) and pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes) palms). It looks a bit like the white part of a very small leek, and when it is cut up, its white concentric circles look the same.

I popped in to Trilogy Restaurant in Pittsburgh for a simple appetizer or first course and a glass of wine a few nights ago. I had a nice glass of 2003 Summerland Chardonnay from Santa Brabara and took a peak at the menu. Sure enough, hearts of palm salad. Now as I just learned prior to sitting down to type this up, hearts of palm is traditionally served in what is called millionaire's salad (who knew?). Since I had never heard of this, and because it's quick and simple to make, I thought I'd mention it here, before I move on to telling you about the Trilogy Salad I did have.

Millionaire's Salad is artichoke hearts, olives, pimentos, and muchrooms with a red wine vinaigrette and some spices (the recipe I found calls for garlic, thyme and parseley). Since it sounds so delicious and simple, and since I suspect that many of you have heard of such as salad I though it deserved mentioning. I also think it would be a nice spring salad and alternative to your normal antipasti.

But here's what I had, and my very abstract recipe for it as I remember it from Trilogy.

* 1 14oz can hearts of palm, drained and sliced into dimes sized circles
* 1/2 lb shrimp, boiled or otherwise pre-cooked however you'd like
(grilling the shrimp might actually be nice come to think of it)
* 1/2 box of pre-cooked pasta, al dente, erring on the harder rather than softer side for texture

I'd put some oil and vinegar on them and let them sit and chill for about two hours and then add about 4 Tbsp. of basil pesto and salt and pepper to taste. Sqeeze some lemon juice over it, mix it up one last time and serve...

So there you have it, two simple, inexpensive salads that will add a liitle bit of diversity to your next gathering. Try it with a clean light to medium white, such as:

2005 Bourassa Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc
2004 Adastra Chardonnay, Carneros
2004 Temecula Hills "No Oak" Chardonnay, Temecula

Ernest Gallo 1909-2007

It is with sadness that I report that Ernest Gallo has died. I have had my hand on the keyboard and eyeballs on the computer screen all day and was unaware of this event until just now. To paraphrase the CNBC announcement that just played in my background, "Ernest Gallo took a recipe for wine that he found in the Modesto Public Library and turned E & J Gallo into the world's largest winery". That's the embodiment of the American Dream.


Here's how Gallo changed the industry. Gallo was the first wine company to hire and train a sales staff spefically to market its brands in individual markets. For example, let's say I sell Chateau Alan at a retail store in New York. I speak to a rep for the New York distributor if I have questions. That rep also sells 300 other wines form all over the world. He gets Chateau Alan from another company in California who has about 50 different wineries they represent. With Gallo, there's a Gallo salesperson in all markets, who is responsible for Gallo products and that's it and he or she works for Gallo. That's the case a little more often with other large wineries and wine conglomerates, but Gallo was first.

I found this amusing write-up from the James Beard Foundation:

"After the war, Ernest devised a bold new advertising campaign for the company, transforming America's relationship with wine with his famous "lifestyle" billboards and ads. And in 1945, he brought his little winery to national attention by convincing Life magazine to attend a grape crush at the winery (the key selling point was a scantily-clad woman bathing in wine). But Ernest's success was due as much to little things as to big ones. He constantly visited stores across the country that stocked his wine, checking on bottle positioning, displays and sales. (He was, as Anthony Dias Blue of Bon Appétit recalls, once arrested in a tiny town in Texas for lurking in local liquor stores. When he explained that he was Ernest Gallo, the sheriff reportedly replied, "and I'm George Washington," and carted him off to jail). Ernest was tireless-and effective. Between 1948 and 1955, sales rose 400%. He set down his precepts in a three-hundred-page secret marketing "Bible" that the family still uses. He is, Dias Blue asserts, unquestionably "a marketing genius."

Here is the E&J Gallo Press Release.

So, raise your next glass to a wine industry innovator and legend who lived the American Dream to the fullest...