Anne Morgan I have made every Delia Smith salad recipe on this list. Each one links to the full article with ingredients, steps, and my notes.
For summer salads start with the potato and rice salads. For a salad dressing recipe, try Delia’s vinaigrette or blue cheese dressing.
1. Lemon Potato Salad
The one I make most often. Warm new potatoes dressed with a lemon and chive vinaigrette while still steaming hot, so every potato soaks up the citrus, with no mayonnaise and no cream, just sharp lemon and fresh chives from Delia’s Summer Collection.
Serves 6, prep 15 min, cook 20 min, 220 kcal. If you only make one potato salad from this list, make this one first.
2. New Potato Salad with Mint and Chives
If you liked the lemon version, try this one from the Complete Cookery Course. Same idea of dressing warm potatoes, but the vinaigrette uses wine vinegar instead of lemon and the herbs change to mint, parsley, chives, and spring onions, making it taste like a completely different salad.
Serves 6, prep 10 min, cook 20 min, 240 kcal. The mint makes this a natural match for lamb.
3. Anya Potato Salad with Shallots
The richest of the three vinaigrette potato salads and the only one using two vinegars: balsamic and sherry together, with steamed Anya potatoes that stay drier so they absorb the dressing better. This one serves 8, making it the best choice for a buffet.
Serves 8, prep 10 min, cook 20 min, 260 kcal. From Complete How to Cook.
4. Roquefort Potato Salad
And if you want cheese with your potatoes, this is the one. Unlike the other three, it uses crème fraîche, mayonnaise, and vinaigrette together, with Roquefort crumbled in twice: once into the dressing, once on top, making it the creamiest potato salad Delia makes.
Serves 6, prep 10 min, cook 25 min, 280 kcal. I serve this at Christmas with cold cuts.
5. Brown Rice Salad
Moving from potatoes to grains. This is the basic brown rice salad from the Complete Cookery Course with walnuts, currants, apple, cucumber, tomatoes, and a simple vinaigrette, and I come back to it every summer because it travels well without wilting.
Serves 4, prep 15 min, cook 45 min, 220 kcal. The foundation recipe that the next four rice salads build on.
6. Pesto Rice Salad
This one changed how I think about rice salads. Instead of dressing the rice after cooking, Delia cooks the Arborio rice directly in homemade pesto so the basil flavour gets into every grain, and the rice comes out pale green with the pesto baked right through it.
Serves 4, prep 10 min, cook 20 min, 420 kcal. From the Summer Collection.
7. Camargue Red Rice Salad
If you want something that looks spectacular, this is it. Deep burgundy Camargue rice dressed with balsamic vinegar and grain mustard, topped with crumbled feta and peppery rocket, and the colour alone makes people stop and stare at a buffet table.
Serves 4, prep 10 min, cook 55 min, 380 kcal. From Complete How to Cook.
8. Spiced Brown Rice Salad
The Christmas party version. Delia adds Madras curry powder to the dressing, which sounds odd but gives the rice a warm background note that ties together the pecans, pistachios, pumpkin seeds, and currants, so make it the day before and forget about it.
Serves 8, prep 15 min, cook 40 min, 240 kcal. From Happy Christmas.
9. Brown and Wild Rice Salad
The biggest batch of all the rice salads: serves 12 as part of a buffet. Wild rice and brown basmati cooked in separate pans because Delia tried doing them together and the timing never worked, with dried cranberries and toasted walnuts scattered through like jewels.
Serves 12, prep 15 min, cook 50 min, 220 kcal. Uses Champagne vinegar in the dressing.
10. Fresh Fruit Salad
Switching from savoury to sweet. Delia’s tropical fruit salad uses mango, pineapple, pawpaw, lychees, and passion fruit soaked in a homemade spiced lime syrup, nothing like the tinned fruit cocktail I grew up with. This is a proper summer dessert.
Serves 8, prep 25 min, cook 10 min, 245 kcal. From the Complete Cookery Course.
11. Winter Fruit Salad
And for the colder months when there is no decent fresh fruit around. Dried prunes, apricots, figs, and raisins soaked overnight and simmered with orange, with no sugar at all because Delia says it tastes better without, and she is right.
Serves 4, prep 10 min, cook 10 min, 320 kcal. Serve with yoghurt and toasted hazelnuts for breakfast or a light pudding.
12. Caesar Salad
Back to savoury. Delia’s caesar uses lime instead of lemon in the dressing, which gives a sharper, more unusual bite, with three types of leaves, homemade Parmesan croutons, and a food processor dressing that takes two minutes.
Serves 4 as a starter, prep 20 min, cook 10 min, 490 kcal. The Summer Collection version.
13. Chicken Caesar Salad
Add grilled chicken to the caesar above and it becomes lunch for two. Same dressing, same croutons, same leaves, but now it is a full meal instead of a starter, and I turned it into its own recipe because I make it that often.
Serves 2 as a main, prep 15 min, cook 15 min, 480 kcal. Leftover roast chicken works too.
14. Salade Nicoise
Another composed salad, this time French. Tinned tuna, hard-boiled eggs, new potatoes, French beans, tomatoes, olives, anchovies, and rocket, all layered with a herb vinaigrette so each piece gets dressed and nothing goes soggy.
Serves 6, prep 30 min, cook 0 min, 420 kcal. From How to Cook Book Two. Serve with crusty baguette.
15. Chicken Waldorf Salad
Delia’s take on the American classic, but with fresh tarragon in the dressing that most waldorf recipes skip. Cold chicken, celery, walnuts, and black grapes in a yoghurt and mayonnaise dressing, and the tarragon lifts the whole thing so it does not sit heavy.
Serves 4, prep 20 min, cook 0 min, 380 kcal. From The Delia Collection: Chicken.
16. Coronation Chicken
If you liked the waldorf, this is the curried version. Delia’s coronation chicken folds cooked chicken into a Madras curry, mango chutney, and yoghurt dressing with raisins, dried apricots, and toasted almonds, miles ahead of anything from a supermarket deli.
Serves 6, prep 25 min, cook 8 min, 340 kcal. My go-to for summer buffets.
17. Tuna and White Bean Salad
For fish lovers. Tinned tuna and cannellini beans in a lemon pepper dressing that uses the oil from the tuna tins, with crushed whole peppercorns, rocket, and red onion rounds on top. An Italian classic from Complete How to Cook.
Serves 4 as a main, prep 15 min, cook 90 min (beans), 450 kcal. Use tinned beans to skip the soaking.
18. Roasted Vegetable Couscous Salad
The Mediterranean entry. Roasted aubergine, courgettes, fennel, cherry tomatoes, and peppers piled onto couscous with a harissa-style dressing and crumbled goat’s cheese, making it the most substantial vegetarian salad Delia makes.
Serves 4, prep 40 min, cook 30 min, 520 kcal. From How to Cook.
19. Ditalini Pasta Salad
Not the creamy mayo pasta salad you might expect. Delia uses tiny ditalini pasta with griddled courgettes, broad beans, peas, and a basil-lemon pesto dressing made with Grana Padano, light, green, and completely different from deli counter pasta salads.
Serves 6, prep 15 min, cook 15 min, 280 kcal. Good alongside grilled fish or chicken.
20. Halloumi Salad
The vegetarian showstopper. Delia fries halloumi slices in seasoned flour and serves them with a lime and caper vinaigrette, and I pile it onto rocket and baby leaves because the flour coating gives a golden crust that grilling alone cannot match.
Serves 2 as lunch, prep 5 min, cook 2 min, 420 kcal. From the Summer Collection. Eat immediately before it goes rubbery.
21. Broad Bean Salad
Seasonal and simple: shelled broad beans simmered for 5 minutes, tossed in a sherry vinegar dressing with crispy crumbled pancetta, herbs, and shallots. The trick is leaving it to rest for two hours before serving so the beans absorb everything. Worth the wait.
Serves 4, prep 15 min, cook 10 min, 340 kcal. From Complete How to Cook. A spring and early summer recipe.
22. Greek Salad
The simplest salad on this entire list. Chunky tomatoes, cucumber, green pepper, red onion, Kalamata olives, and a thick slab of feta on top, with no lettuce and no fancy dressing, just olive oil, wine vinegar, and dried oregano. When the tomatoes are ripe, nothing beats it.
Serves 4, prep 15 min, cook 0 min, 280 kcal. I make this every week in summer.
23. Coleslaw
Every buffet needs a slaw, and Delia’s version from the Cookery Course uses celeriac alongside the usual carrots and cabbage dressed in soured cream and mayonnaise, and the celeriac gives it an earthy depth that straight cabbage coleslaw does not have.
Serves 10, prep 15 min, cook 0 min, 95 kcal. The one recipe on this list that improves overnight.
24. Chunky Green Salad
I saved this for last because it is the one that goes with everything else. Four types of leaves torn not shredded, with cucumber and spring onions in a double-vinegar vinaigrette, no cheese, no nuts, no protein. Just leaves doing what leaves do best: making space for whatever else is on the table.
Serves 8, prep 10 min, cook 0 min, 180 kcal. The side salad for the entire collection.
