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Salade Simple

Monday, May 31st, 2010

my garden

freshly picked

That’s my garden, and that’s my lettuce, ready to be dressed, and this year I’m not confused about that. This year I am like one of those French peasants who picks some rocket from their garden and, without stopping to think, throws together the perfect salad, the recipe for a dressing coded in their DNA.

Until now, my vinaigrette choices rivaled my breakfast cereal choices. Each time I approached a bag of greens, I needed to sort through my cluttered mental pantry for a method. Gordon Hammersly’s with shallots and mustard? Barbara Lynch’s with maple syrup? That other one with Agave syrup? Or my mother’s recipe which requires piles of finely chopped garlic, anchovies, and at least three lemons? And what about the ratio of oil to acid? 1:3 or 1:4?

A lot of these efforts resulted in soggy greens that still need salt.

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Posted in Food, Recipe | View Comments
Tags: Anne de Ravel, New York Times, Saveur Langeudoc

About Heather

Everyone cooked in my family, even my brothers. We subscribed to Gourmet Magazine and hungrily read the articles about what people in little French villages were having for supper, and then my mother and I tried to recreate them ourselves.

My academic background is in painting and writing, but I waitressed at Jasper’s and Hammersly’s Bistro in the 1980’s, when dining in Boston was just becoming exciting, and the people in it - waitstaff and kitchen staff - were like a small university of students and faculty. Everyone knew each other, ate in each other’s restaurants, and were aware that dining in Boston had just turned a corner, inspired by youth, global awareness - these were chefs who had traveled to Europe - and new respect for American ingredients. It was a wonderful community of people who cared about all sorts of good food and wines. Because they cared about these arts, they also cared about growing food, preserving space for it to grow, preserving the lifestyles of people who grow it. We were all beginning to understand that caring about what was served on a plate was to care about the bigger picture.

Married, the mother of two daughters, I now live in Rockport, Ma. My daughters cook. Everyone in our house welcomes a new cookbook for the dinner and dessert possibilities it might offer, which really means the possibility of changing our lives just a little, pretending we live in a little French village for a night. Isn’t that what food does, too - a little bit of theater every single day? “What are we having for dinner tonight?” is really the question of “What is the performance tonight? Where are we traveling? Who will we be?”

I write a column called “Food for Thought” for The Gloucester Daily Times. In it and on this blog, I’m always looking for the possibility food offers for transformation and I’m looking for those wonderful communities of all kinds who care about preparing a great dish, setting a beautiful table, drinking a good glass of wine, and then having a great conversation.
http://blogs.gloucestertimes.com/foodforthought/
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