(Salade niçoise my way, or, the second installment of Salads That Are A Lot Of Work To Make.)

Bon 14 juillet à tous–happy Bastille Day! This salade niçoise is my little way of marking a holiday that I’ve been celebrating since I first began learning French at the age of 4. My parents sent me to a bilingual school, which I attended all the way through highschool; I then went on to get a degree in French (and Russian), part of which I completed in Dijon. (MFK Fisher fans will appreciate my choice of city: it was based almost entirely on her description of the annual Foire Gastronomique, or Food Expo, which I succeeded in gobbling my way through in November 2003.)

You wouldn’t think there would be a lot of controversy about this classic salad, but the French have a way of squabbling over what can and cannot go into dishes that is quite unrivalled. In culinary school, my class kicked up an almighty ruckus after a written exam in which we were asked to list five ingredients that might appear in the salad: almost every student, myself included, had points deducted for items we had at some time or other consumed as part of a salade niçoise.

As my French chef-instructors (one of whom was actually raised in Nice) taught it, the salad included boiled potatoes and green beans, and omitted the cucumber, raw onion and artichokes called for by the “definitive” Larousse Gastronomique…whose version, incidentally, expressly prohibits the addition of boiled potatoes. Chefs Laurent Tourondel and François Payard can’t agree, either.

Well, I’ve been to Nice a couple of times, and here is how I like to make it.

I’ve often seen diners in New York turn up their nose at canned tuna in salade niçoise. This is unfortunate, because canned tuna is not only traditional to the dish–a grilled fillet is too dry to blend well with the other ingredients–but can be a beautiful preparation in itself. I’m not talking about Chicken of the Sea (which has its uses and is not to be snubbed), but imported ventresca (the toro of canned tuna) in olive oil, which costs a bucketload and melts in your mouth.

If it has to be Chicken of the Sea–which it does, with my budget–then I take my 99-cent can of albacore and make Eric Ripert’s (of Le Bernardin) tuna rillettes, which appeared in the New York Times in March as part of an article on making do. It’s one of my favorite things to eat, budget or no budget: bright, tangy and just a little sweet.

Nothing in this recipe is difficult, but it is all of it finicky. The key to a French-style salade composée is that each component be trimmed, cooked (if applicable) and dressed separately, meeting its cohorts for the first time only on the serving plate.

The ingredients in my salade niçoise:

- waxy potatoes, boiled and sliced into rounds
- green beans, trimmed and blanched in heavily salted boiling water
- green peppers, finely sliced
- Roma tomatoes, peeled and quartered
- hard-boiled eggs, quartered
- kalamata olives

I start with a bed of Boston lettuce, torn into manageably-sized pieces and lightly dressed in an emulsified vinaigrette I call “puttanesca”, because it contains capers and, in paste form, the anchovy fillets that traditionally complete the salad. Non-fragile ingredients can be dressed before being assembled on the bed of lettuce; the eggs, tomatoes and potatoes are placed on the lettuce before being drizzled with dressing.

Vinaigrette Puttanesca–makes about 3/4 cup

INGREDIENTS

1 tbs Dijon mustard
1 tsp anchovy paste
3 tbs red wine vinegar
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tbs capers

METHOD

In a medium bowl, whisk mustard, anchovy paste and vinegar until well combined. Slowly add the olive oil, whisking constantly until a creamy emulsion has formed. Stir in the capers.

P.S. If you’ve been following the gas saga, I now have a fully functioning stove!

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