"Gone With the Wind" Actress Olivia de Havilland's Fresh Spinach Salad Recipe
Tim Anderson is a freelance writer/researcher with articles published in The Saturday Evening Post, Playboy magazine, TV Guide, and others.
Clark Gable and Olivia de Havilland in Gone With The Wind.
Olivia's Favorite Spinach Salad
This should be an easy spinach salad to make. Although the typed recipe doesn't say this, it's probably fine to substitute baby spinach for regular spinach if you wish, and if you have a personal salad ingredient you'd like to add, why not be bold?
In any event, the following spinach salad is presented exactly the way Olivia de Havilland would have prepared it. And it may well have kept the actress healthy and shapely not only during the filming of Gone With the Wind, but throughout her storied Hollywood career as well!
Olivia de Havilland and James Cagney in a scene from 1935's "The Irish in Us."
Who Is Olivia de Havilland?
Actress Olivia de Havilland was one of the four principal stars of the celebrated Gone With the Wind movie.
Born on July 1, 1916, in Japan, she came to America as a child and later got into showbiz with her sister Joan Fontaine. Both sisters enjoyed great success in Hollywood. Joan won a Best Actress Oscar in 1941 for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, and Olivia won a Best Actress Oscar in 1946 for her role in To Each His Own.
Some other Olivia de Havilland movies include The Heiress, The Adventures of Robin Hood, To Each His Own, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and many others.
When she passed away on July 22, 2020 at age 104, Olivia was the last surviving Gone With the Wind cast member.
Who knows why she was able to live such a long and healthy life?
Read More From Delishably
Maybe it was her spinach salad!
Is Olivia de Havilland's fresh spinach salad one of the keys to her longevity?
Ingredients
- small can drained grapefruit sections, cut into small bite-size pieces
- 6 oz. cashew nuts
- 1/3 cup vinegar
- 1 cup sunflower oil
- 1 tablespoon celery seed
- 1/4 onion, grated
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon dried mustard
Instructions
- To a normal size bunch of freshly washed raw spinach leaves, add the drained grapefruit and cashew nuts.
- Combine the rest of the ingredients, pour over the salad combination and mix/shake well.
Olivia de Havilland loved a fresh spinach salad!
How I Acquired Olivia de Havilland's Spinach Salad Recipe
I've been an autograph dealer and collector for over 40 years. During the past four decades, I occasionally purchased recipes that celebrities were kind enough to send to a fan who requested one. In several cases, I was able to purchase recipes that had been collected for the purpose of publishing in a planned cookbook.
This original simple spinach salad recipe was Olivia de Havilland's favorite, and she was kind enough to share it with one of her fans.
And now, I'm sharing it with you, and I hope you like it enough to add it to your list of best salad recipes!
Olivia de Havilland played Melanie, one of the four principal stars in Gone With the Wind.
© 2018 Tim Anderson
