Start by placing a clove of garlic and a ½ teaspoon of sea salt in a Japanese-style mortar and use your pestle to grind it to a translucent paste. Cover the garlic with 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar and 1½ tablespoons of Banyuls vinegar and allow it to sit for at least ten minutes so that the acid has time to mellow the heat of the garlic. Whisk in a scant ½ teaspoon of Dijon mustard and then add 6 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, beating vigorously to emulsify. Add a grind of black pepper at the end and taste, adjusting for acid balance and salt––I like mine on the acidic side, so tend to err on the more vinegary end of the spectrum. Use this to dress enough salad for about six. If you like a brighter, more citrusy salad, substitute half of the vinegar for lemon juice, and grate in a 1/2-1 teaspoon of the lemon zest.
If your salad is the center of your meal, add beautifully trimmed and sliced seasonal vegetables, like shaved fennel, slices of watermelon radish, or halved cherry tomatoes. Early spring is a wonderful time for being able to mix the last of the winter citrus with new arrivals like peas. I like to peel tangerines and slice them crosswise so they look like flowers, and slice fat snap peas lengthwise in their pods so that you can see all the beautiful peas inside. And herbs! Always add fresh soft herbs! Shiso, basil, parsley, tarragon, chervil, and cilantro — a handful of aromatic leaves will make a salad sing!
Folio
Plant Food
A special Mother's Day edition from Fanny Singer; author of Always Home, founder of Permanent Collection, and daughter of restaurateur and activist, Alice Waters.
Simple Vinaigrette
For as long as I can remember, "Salad" has been my mother’s answer whenever someone asks her to name her favorite food. And, whether through genes or influence, I’ve taken to responding to that question with an identical reply. It has also always been at the core of my mother's appraisal of me as a child; whenever she was asked about my culinary preferences, she would say, with more than a measure of relief: “At least I got a kid who likes salad.” “A simple green salad” is a phrase I have heard my mother deploy on hundreds of occasions, both at home and abroad, whenever she’s trying to order something that is notably absent from a given restaurant menu. “Do you perhaps have a simple green salad?” she'll innocently ask an unwitting waiter. This request is often met with confusion (who goes to a restaurant to eat uncooked leaves?), or, worse, with a plate of chopped iceberg littered with parched, grated carrot and pale slices of out-of-season tomato. Still, if a restaurant can deliver a plate of crisp, beautiful leaves, dressed lightly in a bright, balanced dressing, that restaurant will very likely skyrocket in our family’s estimation. Which, I think, is one of the reasons why my mother's restaurant, Chez Panisse, has kept a green salad on the menu for close to fifty years.
The bulk of our salad-eating, however, occurs at home, and its preparation is something of a ritual. When I was a child, my mother would place an enormous bowl––and next to it an enormous footed colander––in the center of our copper kitchen sink. To completely dislodge dirt from lettuce you need to soak it in a bath or it will be gritty. If you have a (clean) kitchen sink, it’s easiest to just plug it up and use it as the basin, but a large bowl works well too. Once the lettuce has soaked for long enough (with the water having been refreshed, if necessary) transfer it to the colander to drain. When enough water is cast off, cover a tabletop with thin cotton or linen dish towels and scatter a layer of lettuce across them, followed by another layer of dishtowels over top. Gently roll up each towel-lettuce ‘sandwich’ into a bundled roll and transfer to the refrigerator to await assembly.
I love salad so much that it’s the thing that many friends most associate with my cooking, and happily anticipate at every meal. For my mother's and my favorite green salad, prepare any organic, seasonal lettuce leaves as above and lightly dress (adding more vinaigrette if necessary) with our everyday dressing: