A simple green salad in the middle of the table – to be stabbed at with a fork, not served on small side plates – is an omnipresent part of a Spanish meal. The lettuce generally has just a few thin slices of onion, some wedges of tomato, and a handful of olives, and is dressed with extra-virgin olive oil plus a drop or two of vinegar. It's a year-round accompaniment: familiar, stable.

But in summertime – with greens greener and tomatoes bursting with flavors, with the desire for lighter meals – salads find their voice.

Or voices. Spanish summer salads go far beyond lettuce, combining such disparate ingredients as salt cod and white beans, potatoes and mayonnaise, and long-grain white rice and ham. They're endlessly adaptable to what's ripe in the garden or found in the pantry – a quick rummage will always turn up olives, some tuna, a piece of Manchego cheese to cut into cubes, and, if lucky, a tin of white asparagus, to toss not only with greens, but cold rice or twisty pasta as well. Salads can nibbled on as a bar tapa after work with friends over a cold clara (a mix of beer and lemon Fanta), eaten as a first course, or, on a still-warm evening, the last of the light draining from the sky, as an only course.

Whichever way you eat them, here are three iconic salads to invigorate any summer meal.

Amanida catalana
The "Catalan Salad" hoists the basic green salad up a significant notch, adding salty embutidos – cured and seasoned pork products, from long, thin salamilike fuet and longaniza to classic jamón serrano. With a plate of toasted country bread rubbed with tomatoes and soaked in olive oil alongside, the salad makes a light meal on its own. It's best, though, as the lead in to a long and large lunch.

Such is the case on the Sundays we drive either up to Tamariu on the Costa Brava or down to Sitges for an appetitebuilding swim followed by a late lunch – in Tamariu, it's seafood paella at Royal, in Sitges, fideuà negre at La Santa María. Both are excellent, seaside restaurants that serve generous amanides catalanes, which we attack with gusto.

Ensaladilla rusa
Last summer my wife and girls and I spent a week in a rural inland Valencian village visiting family. My wife's maternal grandparents came from here and there are still lots of aunts and second cousins. Visiting means essentially talking and eating: lunches were paella but dinners started with ensaladilla rusa in every house.

The names means "Russian Salad," though if it originated in Russia – I've read it was invented at a Moscow restaurant in the 1860s – I'm pretty sure it has changed significantly. In its simplest form, Spanish ensaladilla rusa is potato salad with carrots, peas, green beans, bonito tuna, hard-boiled eggs, olives, and plenty of mayonnaise. It's formed in a mound and then decorated with flavor-lending selfexpression. At one house in the village this summer anchovies crisscrossed the top of the salad, at another shreds of roasted piquillo red peppers zebra-striped it, while at a third the salad was topped with a row of piggy-backing jumbo shrimp. My favorite was the version sweetened with crunchy pieces of apple and crowned with a tight row of shelled walnuts.

One night we ate in the village's only bar, and found that they, too, had a distinct version. But then so does nearly every bar across the country. From Galicia to Andalucía, ensaladilla rusa is a universal and much-loved tapa in bars of every level. It's comes studded with picos (two-inch-long bread sticks) as one of the house specialties of Barcelona's best tapas bar, Inopia, which is co-owned by Albert Adrià, pastry chef at El Bulli and brother of Ferran. In another favorite bar of mine, Fragment's Café, the chef blends roasted piquillo peppers into mayonnaise, giving the salad a rusty tint and a lovely smoky flavor.

But my favorite time to eat ensaladilla rusa is at my in–laws beach place south of Barcelona before they have moved out for the summer and the refrigerator remains not only empty but unplugged. We stroll to La Pava beside the autovía and buy a succulent rotisserie chicken and some of their ensaladilla rusa. Back on the apartment terrace, wedged in a corner of still-pleasant sun, we devour the dripping, herb-laced chicken with the cold and creamy salad. A perfection in pairing.

Empedrat
Salt cod is a Spanish staple that is eaten in dozens of different ways across the country. In Catalunya, one classic preparation is in a salad called esqueixada. The salt cod is soaked in water to rehydrate it and rid some of its saltiness, handshredded (esqueixar means "to shred"), and mixed with chopped tomatoes, black olives, and plenty of extra–virgin olive oil. A traditional variation on this called empedrat adds white beans.

The other Saturday, we had gone over to our friends Cesc and Eli's house for lunch in their back garden, and they carried out a platter of clams (brown and ridged, meaty) served chilled on the half shell and a big wooden bowl of empedrat. We drank a fine chilled bottle of Galician Albariño from Bodegas Terras Gauda and ate without hurry, squeezing lemon over the raw clams and spooning more salad into our bowls. The empedrat was perfect, the saline shreds of salt cod blending perfectly with the creamy, nuttytasting local white kidney beans known as ganxets.

We finished the Albariño and moved on to an elegant Cristiari rosé from Costers del Segre, fruity and intense without being sweet. There was another dish to come, but I was content: I had found my salad – and my wines – to enjoy these next months. It’s going to be a good summer.