Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (9 page)

To finish the
tian
, beat the eggs very well with the cheese, add
plenty of seasonings (don’t forget the nutmeg) and the coarsely chopped parsley.

Amalgamate the eggs and the vegetable mixture, increase the heat of the oven to 180–190°C/350–375°F/gas mark 4 or 5, and leave the
tian
to cook until the eggs are set, risen in the dish, and beginning to turn golden on the top. The time varies between 15 and 25 minutes depending on various factors such as the depth of the dish, the comparative density of the vegetable mixture, the freshness of the eggs and so on.

When the
tian
is to be eaten cold, leave it to cool in its dish before inverting it on to a serving dish or plate. It should turn out into a very beautiful looking cake, well-risen and moist. For serving cut it in wedges. Inside, there will be a mosaic of pale green and creamy yellow, flecked with the darker green of the parsley and the red-gold of the tomatoes.

To transport a
tian
on a picnic, it can be left in its cooking dish, or turned out on to a serving plate. Whichever way you choose, cover the
tian
with greaseproof paper and another plate, then tie the whole arrangement in a clean white cloth, knotted Dick Whittington fashion.

FRENCH BEAN SALAD

Fine French beans, bootlace thin, which need only topping and tailing, not stringing, make the most exquisite salad, and one which contrasts well with the courgettes in a mixed salad as described above.

Allow 125 g (4 oz) beans per person. Cook them for not more than 7 minutes in boiling salted water. Drain them, and while still warm, mix them in a bowl with olive oil, lemon juice and more salt if necessary. Do not be tempted to add anything else. It is the simplicity of the seasoning and the fresh flavour of the beans which make the dish.

This salad is at its best made immediately before the meal. It does not keep well.

SWEET GREEN PEPPER SALAD

The first time I tasted a sweet pepper salad made in the way described below was in an hotel at Orange, on the road south to Provence.

The spread of crudités brought to the table on an hors d’oeuvre tray looked, even in a part of the country where the hors d’oeuvres are always fresh and shining, especially appetising. There were the usual salads, tomato, cucumber, grated raw carrots, olives green and black, anchovies, and this salad of green peppers cut so finely that when we first saw them we thought they were shredded French beans. There is nothing in the least complicated about preparing it, but if it’s to be made in any quantity it does take a little time.

For part of a mixed hors d’oeuvre for 3 or 4 people you need one large green sweet pepper, weighing about 200–250 g (7–8 oz), plus a small quantity of onion, salt, sugar, olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice, parsley.

Cut the stalk end from the pepper and discard all seeds and core. Rinse very thoroughly. Cut the pepper across into strips about 3.5 cm (1½ in) wide. Slice each of these strips into the thinnest possible little slivers, scarcely longer than a match. Put them into a bowl. Add a very little thinly sliced onion – no more than a teaspoonful. Season rather generously with salt, add a pinch of sugar, then 3 tablespoons of olive oil, one of wine vinegar, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a sprinkling of parsley. And, if possible, make the salad an hour or so in advance. Sweet peppers are all the better for being marinated in their dressing a little while before they are to be eaten.

Greek white cheese or feta is nearly always eaten as a meze or first course and goes uncommonly well with raw vegetables such as fennel, the shredded peppers described above, radishes, and with new broad beans. The latter are simply put on the table, as they are, in the pod, on a big dish. Sea salt and good coarse bread should be part of this primitive summer feast.

Wine & Food
, June/July 1969

Leaf Salads

Anyone who has visited Venice in the spring and in the early autumn will remember the ravishing and original salads offered in the Venetian restaurants, and the tremendous display of salad
leaves and greenstuff to be seen on the stalls in the Rialto market.

Many of these salad stuffs are quite unfamiliar to English eyes. There are three or four varieties of chicory leaves, none of these resembling what we know by that name. One of the northern Italian
cicoria
varieties is the rose-red plant known as
cicoria rossa
of Treviso, another is pink and white and frilly and comes from Castelfranco (both these regions are in the Veneto), yet another has green, elongated leaves and is known as
cicoria spadona
or sword-leaved chicory, a fourth is a lettuce-like plant and, just to help, all these chicories are also called
radicchio
; this is not to be confused with radish or
ravanelli
, of which the leaves are also eaten in salad.

Some of the salad plants, notably the beautiful rose-red chicory, has more decorative value than taste; the green ones are mild and slightly bitter; another, more interesting, salad leaf is
rugeta
or in Venice,
rucola
(nearly all Venetian food names whether fish, fungi or vegetable, differ from those of the rest of Italy), which has a peppery little leaf once familiar in England as rocket, in France as
roquette
, in Greece it is
rocca
, and in Germany
senfkohl
which means mustard herb; then there is corn salad or lamb’s lettuce (in Venetian,
gallinelle
, in French,
mâche
), and little bright green serrated leaves which the market women call
salatina
.

In the market, all these salad furnishings are offered for sale in separate boxes, each variety lightly piled up, shining and clean, ready for weighing out. (In Italy salads are bought by the kilo, not by the piece.) There will also be boxes of crisp fennel, violet-leaved artichokes and intensely green courgettes, their bright marigold-coloured flowers still intact.

In the restaurants, the true Venetian restaurants that is, rather than the hotel dining-rooms where you may well have to put up with English-type lettuce and tomato dressed with over-refined olive oil, you will see big bowls of mixed leaves arranged like full-blown peonies for a table decoration, infinitely fresh and appetising. (It is an interesting point that while few Italians are capable of making a graceful flower arrangement, their foodstuffs are invariably displayed with most subtle artistry.) When you order a salad, a waiter will bring one of these bowls to your table so that you can make your choice. Your salad will be mixed for you; the dressing will be of fruity olive oil which has character (it is rare in northern Italy to find poor olive oil) and, in the Veneto, a very good pale rosé wine vinegar. In short you will get a civilised
salad which is a treat to the eye as well as a stimulus to the palate and a refreshment to the spirit.

In the early summer of 1969 the salads of Venice made such an impact on one of my sisters – it was her first visit to Venice – that we went to the market and bought seeds of all the local salad plants we could find.

Some of these plants, notably the rocket (its Latin name is
Eruca sativa
; it used to be common in English gardens) did remarkably well that summer in my sister’s little cottage garden, near Petersfield; in another garden in the Isle of Wight it grew like a weed, far into the autumn. Sorrel and corn salad, single-leaved parsley, and pink chicory were all forthcoming from these gardens, and so it was that during the warm summer and the long miraculous autumn of that year we all feasted on fresh and spring-like salads almost every day of our lives. English radishes were uncommonly crisp and good, English broad beans scented the greengrocers’ shops like a beanfield, mange-tout peas were so delicate and sweet that to eat them raw was like tasting some extraordinary new kind of sorbet – and there were those heartening salads, not it is true at all like Venetian salads but delicious in their own way, and original. (In Venice, we could not have eaten them all summer through. It is too hot. The leafy little salads vanish by the end of May, to reappear only in the autumn.)

GARDEN SALAD

A cos or Webb’s lettuce, sorrel leaves, rocket, corn salad, single-leaf parsley (also called, variously, French, Italian, or Greek parsley), chives or green onion tops, and any fresh green salad herbs you may fancy, or have growing in your garden.

With stainless steel kitchen scissors cut the washed and dried lettuce leaves into strips or ribbons. Also cut up a few young sorrel leaves (if they are very small, leave them whole). Mix in a shallow bowl or large soup plate with a handful of corn salad leaves, chives, and French parsley cut with scissors.

Mix the salad at the table with a fruity olive oil and mild wine vinegar dressing to which you have added a very small pinch of sugar as well as salt. With the peppery flavour of the rocket you will not need to add extra pepper.

Proportions of the different salad greens are dictated by individual taste and by what chances to be available. For example,
instead of rocket, you could use a few nasturtium leaves which also have a rather peppery tang. Very small tender beetroots, freshly boiled, skinned, sliced and seasoned with dressing while still tepid, make a delicious addition to this salad.
Add them to the greenery only at the last minute
.

Fresh crisp radishes, sliced into little rounds, make another nice addition.

A salad such as this one, based on seasonal leaves and green herbs, should be mixed in a spontaneous easy manner. If it is made into a great production overloaded with urban furbelows such as avocado slices, orange segments, slices of sweet pepper and so on, the rural character is sacrificed.

Unpublished, 1969

A fine example of how much our food has changed in thirty years – at least in part because of Elizabeth David’s evocative writing. Now, most of the ingredients she describes are readily available and although these days some salad greens are bland and tasteless, the chicories, rocket and cresses retain their bite, corn salad its gentler flavour. What still remains hard to buy is the mixed small leaves sold as
salatina
in Italy,
mesclun
in France.

JN

Crudités

This year our English spring was cold, wild and windblown. The garden salad greens and herbs were late coming on the market. So it was well into May before I saw home-grown romaine lettuces at my local greengrocery store. On the same day there were the first new broad beans, imported from southern France, and in another shop a box of mini-size fennel offered at half the price of the big ones and worth twice as much. (Only horses could get their teeth into those great over-swollen things, large as coconuts and about as tough.) With a bunch of watercress and a lemon, sea salt and Tuscan olive oil, I had all the makings of a fresh summer salad for a couple of guests.

To be exact, it wasn’t a salad that I made, it was a dish of crudités, in the true sense of the term, not meaning just another
variant of salade nicoise, nor an incompatible assortment of hors d’oeuvre, cooked and uncooked, in season and out of it. A saucer of Maldon salt was at each place, so was a little boat of olive oil, unmixed, unseasoned with anything whatsoever.

Well, that innocent plateful of what I suppose would be dismissed by many people as rabbit food – lucky rabbits, sensible rabbits – gave us intense enjoyment. The salad ingredients I had found in the shops were, it is true, pretty basic. All the same, they were good enough in their own right to add up to just the kind of small luxury which reminds me very forcibly that salads aren’t made to rules and recipes. The perfect salad is as elusive as the perfect omelette. It happens when you have the ingredients and not too many of them, in the right condition, the opportunity to eat them quickly, the confidence to leave them unadorned.

A big production – counting this, adding that, measuring the other – doesn’t work nearly as well as a light hand assembling a few fresh green leaves in a bowl. The more swiftly a salad is put together and the sooner it is eaten the better. I don’t see how it’s feasible to make rules about dressings any more than it is for the salads they’re to go with. Too much depends upon the kind of oil you have, and the quality of the vinegar, and whether or not you care for garlic, and what the content of the salad may be. I am certain about a couple of points though. One is that if you have fine first pressing Italian or Provence olive oil, to savage it with acid and sugar and pepper and mustard is a terrible thing. It seems to me equally thoughtless to mix it up into a dressing to store in the refrigerator. It takes less time to mix a fresh dressing than to let an icy cold one come back to room temperature.

Williams-Sonoma booklet, 1975

PARSLEY SALAD

Mix together in a dish a large bunch of chopped parsley, a fresh onion well minced and the pulp of a large lemon cut in small pieces, sprinkle the juice of a lemon on this mixture and add a pinch of salt.

ORANGE SALAD

Peel a few oranges and cut them in large pieces, taking out the pips, adding a few spoonfuls of orange flower water, stir, then sprinkle lightly with powdered cinnamon. Is very soothing.

SALAD OF COS LETTUCE

A fine cos lettuce, finely chopped, sprinkled with the juice of two oranges, a pinch of salt and a good deal of pepper. A curious and very refreshing mixture.

Three unpublished recipes, 1960s

ANGEVIN SALAD

This is a lovely salad to serve after a roast turkey or capon.

Hearts of 2 lettuces or of 2 curly endives or Batavian endives, 250 g (½ lb) Gruyère or Emmenthal cheese, olive oil and wine vinegar for the dressing.