"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.

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!

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?

Maybe it was her spinach salad!

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

1. To a normal size bunch of freshly washed raw spinach leaves, add the drained grapefruit and cashew nuts.
2. Combine the rest of the ingredients, pour over the salad combination and mix/shake well.

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!

© 2018 Tim Anderson

Comments

Tim Anderson (author) from Utah on March 22, 2020:

Thank you Samantha! If you'll check my other articles on Delishably, you'll find some favorite recipes of actress Julie Harris and singer Dinah Shore. I have a few others I'll soon add. Enjoy!

Samantha on March 22, 2020:

I love this! Would you happen to have the recipes of other celebrities? If so, who?

Tim Anderson (author) from Utah on March 27, 2018:

Thank you Lorraine! I have always been a big fan of Olivia de Havilland as well. I plan to publish some more of the celebrity recipes I've acquired over the years, so you may want to check back now-and-then! Best wishes -- Tim Anderson

chinatree70@gmail.com on March 27, 2018:

I was always on Melanie*s side when I watched Gone with the Wind!

Her spinach salad sounds delicious.

My mother always made her wonderful spaghetti sauce from a recipe my aunt cut out of the Los Angeles Times (1950ish) attributed to Don Ameche. It is still the one everyone in the family loves and asks for,I guess the oldies are the goodies.

Thank you for another.

Lorraine Gunn