Salad days

It must be spring, I found myself buying salad greens this weekend. I have noticed that I only make salads when the outside temperature is above 20°. It's not conscious, I don't stand rapt in the grocer's shop calculating whether the time has come; it's just a question of appetites, and the fact that this particular appetite is directly proportional to the weather. Perhaps it is a subconscious rebellion against the aseasonality of modern agriculture: In winter I eat cooked vegetables, the way Nature intended us to do.

I don't remember that my mother made many salads, so perhaps I associate salads with summer holidays for that reason; but there is a definite prime cause, a smoking gun, a First Time, in my love of summer salads. The ultimate salad, the Platonic Ideal of salad, is a particular Niçoise that I ate one summer afternoon in an outdoor café near the harbour in Nice nearly thirty years ago, under a faded orange sun-umbrella. I have been eating Niçoises all across Europe and North America ever since, I've tried out every recipe that crosses my path, and though many have come honourably close, none of them has achieved the mind-expanding wonder, the culinary magic, of that first salad. The secret and the stumbling-block is the dressing: it sounds as easy as snoring, but oh! So tricky, so many subtle variations.

The easy holder of second-place honours was a Niçoise eaten under a majestic flowering wisteria vine in a courtyard restaurant somewhere between Sélestat and Colmar in Alsace, three summers ago: rich and creamy, with a hint of sweet mustard.

Don't think I'm obsessive about Niçoise salads, I also have been known to eat Capresi and Caesar salads (with and without barbecued chicken strips); and I used to make a mean Spinach, Roquefort and Walnut salad, but I can't eat that since I developed some food allergies a few years back. The classic Rucola and Parmesan salad with balsamico vinaigrette can also be very fine.

On a possibly related note: I've dreamed four times in the last two weeks about jogging, and in my dreams I enjoyed it greatly. Perhaps my body is trying to tell me something.

[Update: Witho has just posted a non-traditional Niçoise, with new potatoes, string beans and very little that's identifiably fishy. To each her own. How does your Niçoise look?]