LONDON — When you hear “summer salad,” I bet the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a bunch of vegetables cooked within an inch of their lives and left to hang out so their juices meld and their flavors turn hearty and complex. These kinds of techniques are usually left to robust meaty stews or wintry soups, and not applied to the cream of the summer’s freshest and juiciest crop.

In reality, some of the best and most wonderful dishes using summer’s glut are doing just that, and with huge success. They may not look like your typical salad; they can also be seen as dips or spreads. But salads are what they are, because they keep the integrity of the vegetables as they are mixed together, and they are mostly served cold, alongside other dishes.

Though you can find cooked salads all around the northern and eastern Mediterranean — French ratatouille and Italian peperonata are variations on the theme — I find that the best examples are served in North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Tunisia. This is where you will often find little bites of exquisitely cooked vegetables, served alongside fresh raw salads. Called kemia, they are the equivalent of mezze or tapas in other parts of the region.

Taktouka is one of my favorites: It involves grilling green pepper over fire or in the oven, and then cooking it slowly in a pan with chopped tomatoes, garlic, cumin and lots of olive oil. It gets better after a day or two, once the flavors have been left to develop and the ingredients to interact and amalgamate. Zaalouk is another popular variant, in which eggplants take the place of the peppers; they can be grilled first, or cooked throughout in the pan with the tomatoes.