Imperative cooking: green salad
Green salads in southern French cooking are served after the main course and consist of endive, chicory or lettuce with oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and garlic. Their failure, as with many dishes, is caused not by technically incompetent cooking but by lazy, mean or ignorant shopping.
If you cannot get good olive oil, give up. Olive oil is bought from Italian or Greek shops. Buy two one-gallon tins, one lighter tasting, the other heavier. If you are cook- ing other things properly, you will need a lot of olive oil; if you are not, there is not much point in having a well-made salad. The oil keeps better in its tin. Do not decant it into a Habitat glass jar. If you are too poor or mean to afford the olive oil, too lazy to go to the Italian shop or too vainly preoccupied with your weight to use it lavishly, give up. There are no substitutes.
Wine vinegar is widely available but much is dreadful. Buy red wine vinegar and in good amounts, preferably litres. Large sizes of such goods are not only cheaper: they are some indication that the item is bought by ordinary regular users not occa- sional faddists. If you see wine vinegar bot- tles with other things in, garlic, tarragon, exotic twigs or maraschino cherries, do not buy them or anything else in that shop either. Warn your friends about it. Cider vinegar is not a substitute for wine vinegar, lemon juice is. Lemon juice is found in lemons, not in yellow plastic.
Salt is the easiest item. Ignore the ranting of health food activists. The type makes lit- tle difference in salad providing it is not table salt. Use cooking, rock or sea salt. If you use sea salt, do not let it be known. Much of it comes from the Mediterranean near Montpellier. Guests have been known to use its presence as an excuse to start tedious and competitive conversations about gItes and authentic cassoulet.
Buy peppercorns from an Indian shop. They should be black (the peppercorns, not the Indians). Buy at least half a pound and grind them when you make the salad. Pep- per grinders should be big and their innards made of metal. They should not be shaped like rabbits or be made of clear perspex. (It is not really very interesting watching the corns being ground or, in the case of many grinders, not being ground).
Buy garlic at Italian shops except when European garlic is sprouting (the Spring); then Chinese shops often sell better quality garlic. Look for heads with fairly big cloves and if they are sprouting, remove the shoots.
If you must put mustard in your salad, choose one from France not Germany. (Indeed, a good rule for elementary cooks Is to use nothing German or Scandinavian.) The mustard, like the vinegar, should not have strange things in it and it is not essen- tial that the label be written in antique script. Another ingredient for salads sometimes recommended is crusts of French bread. The French sometimes add this. They occasionally have good bread and bread which is suitable. Ours is never either, so forget it. Last you need the salad itself. M°5t English greengrocers do not sell good salad at a reasonable price in the summer and none does so in the winter. Buy from street- markets or from Italian and Greek shops. Indeed another good rule is to avoid English greengrocers altogether. The ordin- ary ones sell nothing except elephantine sprouts and satsumas. The 'quality' Or are identical except they start selling the sprouts in August and their satsumas are ill dividually wrapped in tissue paper. BuY let- tuces which taste of something and take UP oil well. The best are Sucrine and unavail- able here. Density are a substitute. Webb!, are too watery. Above all, do not buy anything in a plastic bag from Holland. When you have your ingredients, the du" ficult part is done. Inspect your salad. . 11 to get away with not washing it. A dirty salad is supportable. Some insecticides are just bearable. But a salad aspersed in thrice recycled Thames water is inedible. If Ptito have to wash it, use a French dryer tub . get rid of the water. Now grind the salt art. d pepper into a large bowl, white and plam, and not something authentic from rile, Algarve. Pound a clove or two of garlic and add vinegar and oil in a one-to-three or one' to-four ratio. How much oil? As much as possible without conspicuous waste. M,, the lot and toss the salad in. Make sure all the leaves are coated. You don't want t0 pleraevpearaenytbeesscaalpaed just the healthyaltohu Eat it off full-size plates, not out of wooden dog bowls or emptied avocado skills' Everyone will eat it and no one will be allowed to add anything else to it (except more oil). If anyone does not ask for more' do not invite them again and never go to
dinner at their house. fnaneeatiticisti.
Digby Anderson
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