have a confession to make: I don't like my mother's salad dressing. It's thin, sour, and without flavors that interest me. But the taste is burned into my palate. My mother uses some combination of oil, vinegar, and spices, although I have no sense of her proportions. She does, obviously, because her salad dressing tastes exactly the same every time she makes it, which is every night.

My mother is actually a skilled cook whose creativity in the kitchen is fueled by her curiosity about flavors and textures. A stickler for quality and nutrition, she always uses the freshest ingredients she can find to build tasty soups, delicious stews, savory entrées, and mouth-watering desserts. Her chicken cacciatore is outstanding. So, too, are her various pasta creations, her heavenly lemon pie with the meringue crust, and the selection of dishes that she serves alongside her succulent brined turkey every Thanksgiving.

But the salad dressing she pours over those uninspired romaine leaves, which she spruces up with a miserly scattering of black olives and onion slivers is like pins and needles across my tongue.

How awful it feels to reject my own mother's vinaigrette. It's a slap in the face, really, the ultimate rebellion, because salad dressing is a thing that transcends cooking. Like a fingerprint, a favorite perfume, a preferred hat, or a beloved poem, a signature salad dressing can function as an extension of basic identity.

Case in point: At 37, I feel confident that my lime-and-herb-based vinaigrette is a fully realized expression of my newfound maturity. It brings bountiful salads to life, awakens taste buds across the entire surface of the tongue, and has dazzled more than a few friends. Making salad dressing is also one of the few endeavors over which I have genuine mastery. I'm actually so familiar with my ingredients and sense of proportions, that I find it difficult to translate the physical process into a recipe that would be valuable to others.

I know that when I grab the neck of my heavy olive-oil bottle, I'll pour for precisely four and a half seconds with my right thumb over half the spout, whereas I let the walnut oil run for only one second. The garlic gets crushed rather than chopped, and I always chop rather than grind the herbs. Orange-blossom honey goes in toward the end, and I know that if I keep pouring for a second longer than I think I should, I will have added the perfect amount. Like my weakness for the color purple and my impatience with republicans, my personal salad dressing has become yet another vehicle for self-definition.

But salad dressings didn't appear on my radar until my early 20s. Once, when I was helping my Aunt Sheila in the spacious kitchen of my grandmother's beach house, she made a big production out of whisking Dijon mustard into her olive-oil-and-balsamic mixture. I knew so little about food preparation back then that it had never occurred to me to think of cooking as a craft. Yet the process of making the dressing, which utilized method and improvisation, intrigued me. I was also enamored with the idea that you could make the same vinaigrette a hundred times without ever duplicating a batch.

I lived in many apartments throughout my 20s, held numerous jobs, and hosted countless potluck dinners. Friends would come over with dishes they had made, or ingredients for dishes they were going to make, and booze. I would always provide the salad. At the last minute I'd agonize over a bowl of vinaigrette, but the opportunity to dress the salad felt to me like stealing the last word in a debate or sinking candles into a birthday cake.

One evening, a dear but competitive friend challenged me to a "salad-dressing-off." He had created the perfect new dressing, he said, which was sure to blow my vinaigrette right out of the water. Determined to defend my dominant hostess status, I felt that I had no choice but to accept his challenge. The following weekend, we collaborated on an elaborate pasta dinner, made a tremendous salad, and asked various friends to act as judges.

The afternoon of our dinner party, Sebastian and I labored over our individual dressings in our own kitchens. I bought blue cheese at a fancy gourmet shop and attempted a blue-cheese/vinaigrette fusion. Meanwhile, Sebastian manufactured a quasi-Asian concotion, which featured soy sauce, sesame oil, and honey. Our friends sampled the dressings and handed down a unanimous verdict: Both were disgusting. My boyfriend, Michael, who later became my husband, ran out to the store for a bottle of Newman's Own.

Over the years I've noticed that signature salad dressings are something like children, in that you always think the world of your own, while the progeny of others seem worthy of perpetual criticism. Moreover, most people who feel wedded to signature salad dressings are extraordinarily protective and tend to push their creations on friends and relatives with the hope of receiving accolades. Whenever I eat with my friend Sarah, she insists on whipping up a fresh batch of her vinaigrette, which is a delicious blend of argan oil, grapeseed oil, and honey-Dijon mustard. My neighbor, on the other hand, swears by a dressing she buys by the case at Costco; she promotes the sugary, emulsifier-infused condiment as if she had invented it herself. Another friend is so enamored of his unusual rose-petal vinaigrette that he has threatened on more than one occasion to go into business selling the stuff via specialty shops and the Internet.

Then there are people who, for whatever reason, never cultivate a personal dressing. My husband is such a talented cook that people often ask him why he never became a chef, yet he seems content to eat my salad dressing or experiment with random off-the-shelf varieties. But our salad eating styles are completely different. A modest portion on the side of Michael's plate is plenty for him, whereas I've been known to fill an entire mixing bowl with salad, which I'll devour in a single sitting.

I know of only one person whose passion for salad rivals my own, and that's my mother. But why does she settle for those minimalist salads with that lame dressing? Because, I suppose, she loves her salads the way she prepares them.

How wonderful is it, though, that I don't like my mother's vinaigrette! Mom and I have shared a wonderfully close, but terribly symbiotic, relationship for most of my 37 years here on planet Earth. Yet maybe my deviation on the point of salad and dressing is a subtle indication that expressing my own tastes and preferences doesn't make me a "bad girl." In fact, maybe our disparate approaches reveal a refreshing truth: that my mother and I are not two versions of the same person after all, even though our voices sound hauntingly alike over the telephone.

My mother is attracted to moderation, whereas I am drawn to excess; her inclination toward simplicity is offset by my passion for complexity. When I set out to make a salad, I can't stop at romaine leaves sprinkled with black olives and onions. To the contrary, my bountiful and unconventional salads start with a foundation of red leaf lettuce and baby spinach. Then I add most or all of the following ingredients: diced yellow and red peppers, carrots, mushrooms, endive, black olives, crumbled French feta cheese, tangerine wedges, avocado, sunflower seeds, currants, and maybe some chopped walnuts and dried cranberries. And, whenever they are in season, snap peas, sweet corn, and mangos.

As for my salad dressing, the most I can offer is a list of ingredients and luck with process and proportion, which I myself improvise weekly. My dressing contains: olive oil, walnut oil, the juice of two limes, balsamic vinegar, garlic, salt and pepper, Dijon mustard, orange-blossom honey, and a generous portion of freshly chopped rosemary or tarragon.

However, we'll see what my daughter, Isabelle, has to say about my dressing 30 years from now when she replaces my hand-me-down flatware with a design she has selected herself, and when she realizes suddenly, and with some sense of relief, I hope, that our relationship can simmer on the back burner while she tends to her own spirited offspring. By then, perhaps, she will have crafted her own signature salad dressing, which she will force down the throats of friends and relatives, as if it's the culinary masterpiece of all time. And I'll pretend to love it, the way my mother pretends to love mine, even if it's thin and sour and without flavors that interest me.