Salade Niçoise (la salada nissarda)
Imagine you’re in a coastal town, on a beach, on the French Riviera. Beaches filled with smooth polished stones, topless sunbathers, some smooth too, surround you too. The Sun breaths down on you like a giant dragon, your sunglasses continuously slide down the bridge of your nose. Uniformed waiters deliver refreshments from the Hotel Négresco, administered like medicine, in this oppressive hot weather. Serge Gainsbourg licks the inside of a portable stereo as he drools through the speakers, grunting of love, lust and motorcycles (but mostly lust).
This is the Côte d’Azur. The beaches curl off in either direction. Northeast to Monaco, southwest to St. Troprez. This is the home of such wonderful delights as Pissaladière, Bouillabaisse, and Salade Niçoise.
Salade Niçoise, along with the rest of the food of Nice, is quintessentially outdoor food. Perfectly casual, delightfully refreshing, and completely satisfying.
There is one problem with Salade Niçoise. Not terribly long ago, I was at a very nice French café in Oakland with the girl I was dating, she looked over my shoulder while I was talking, and I, curious as to what caught her attention turned around. She had spotted the customer behind me eating a Salade Niçoise. I quickly complained, only to her, that what they were serving was incorrect. I went on to describe Salade Niçoise, as I know it, and pointed out everywhere they failed.
A few days later we were at a bookstore and I approached her with an armload of French cookbooks, and began to look up the various Salade Niçoise within. To my dismay I found that not only was that place in Oakland doing it wrong, but……so was I.
I learned Salade Niçoise during my early years as a cook at a French restaurant who shall remain nameless. Salade Niçoise was one of the more popular salads on our menu. It was not however, a true Salade Niçoise.
I have eaten Salade Niçoise seemingly everywhere, as it is one of my favorite lunches for hot weather. I’ve had it in New York’s Soho. San Francisco. I even sat down across the street from Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where Chopin lays buried beneath marble and hundreds of red roses. I sat there at a charming sidewalk café and had it. None of those were a true Salade Niçoise (some less so than others)
So, for you I have decided to give you what I used to make and call, blissfully ignorant, Salade Niçoise, based on what I have learned over the years from various versions:
Serves 4 as a main course
Serves 6 as a first course
4 medium sized tomatoes cut into six wedges each
1 English cucumber, washed and peeled in stripes then cut into discs
1 small red onion, diced fine
½ cup Nicois olives, leave the pits in
12 basil leaves torn by hand
3 hard boiled eggs*, cut into quarters
2 bunches of mâche (also known as lambs lettuce)
½ lb. Blanched green beans
2 boiled new potatoes, sliced
1 can or jar or Flott tuna (from Sicily), packed in olive oil, drained (reserve the oil for dipping bread into later)
4-6 anchovy fillets, chopped fine
1 clove garlic, chopped fine
3 Tbs. Red wine vinegar
8 Tbs. Extra virgin olive oil (more if you like)
sea salt
fresh ground black pepper
Place the tomatoes and cucumbers in a colander and sprinkle with a light dusting of sea salt, place a plate on top and let sit for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, chop the garlic and anchovy together and set aside. When the 30 minutes is up, transfer the tomatoes and cucumber to a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients except the mâche.
Form a small nest of mâche on each plate and arrange the rest of the ingredients around the nest. If you make this for somebody on a hot day, they will love you without the slightest inclination of why.
*To hard boil eggs: submerge eggs in boiling water and boil for 11 minutes. Drain and plunge into cold water. This will cook them properly without making the yolk blue or chalky.
Now, that was the mock Salade Niçoise. Here are what the experts say.
“This salad” as the brilliant food writer Waverly Root so finely put it, “is innocent of lettuce.” I admit the mâche was my own idea, but both Elizabeth David and Julia Child use butter lettuce in theirs. What’s more, the people of Nice insist, in no uncertain terms, that a true Salade Niçoise contains nothing cooked, with the exception of the tuna of course and the hard-boiled eggs. So that rules out our green beans, and the potatoes. Still others say the hard-boiled eggs are a Parisian twist to their dish, and have no actual roots in Nice.
Jacques Médecin, ex-Mayor of Nice (exiled from France due to a corruption scandal), argues quite emotionally that a true la salada nissarda (Provençal dialect) should contain nothing cooked (he allows for the boiled egg), no vinegar be used, he salts the tomatoes three times, he furthermore laments that due to the expense of preserved tuna, a real Niçois would not use it. They’d use the tuna for other occasions, but not this common salad. Anchovies, on the other hand, he was fine with. Preserved tuna, packed in olive oil, like the superior Flott brand that I recommend seems to be the standard with the other recipes I’ve checked. There was a fad not long ago of searing tuna for this sort of salad (I know of some places that still do this) this is heavily frowned upon.
Where does this leave us?
It leaves me with having to come up with another recipe. We can see where all of the experts differ, if we look carefully we can see where they overlap. From there we can be certain that the boiled potato, and blanched green beans don’t belong anywhere near a Salade Niçoise. Then, furthermore, from the wide range of recipes I have to guide me, I can decide which ones are most accurate by their stature as a chef and relative pulse of the feeling of Nice.
Here is Salade Niçoise in all it’s glory (and controversy!)
Serves 4 as a main course
Serves 6 as a first course
4 medium sized tomatoes cut into six wedges each
1 English cucumber, washed and peeled in stripes then cut into discs
1 Anaheim bell pepper (green pepper will do, but the Anaheim is closer to the thin walled variety they have in Nice) cut into rings
1 small white or red onion (not yellow), diced fine
½ cup Nicois olives, leave the pits in
12 basil leaves torn by hand
3 hard boiled eggs*, cut into quarters
½ lb. Fresh shucked fava beans**
1 can or jar or Flott tuna (from Sicily), packed in oil, drained
4-6 anchovy fillets chopped fine***
1 clove garlic, chopped fine
3 Tbs. Red wine vinegar
8 Tbs. Extra virgin olive oil (more if you like)
sea salt
fresh ground black pepper
Place the tomatoes and cucumbers in a colander and sprinkle with a light dusting of sea salt, place a plate on top and let sit for 30 minutes. Drain, and add to a salad bowl. Add the rest of ingredients and toss well. Serve equal portions and enjoy.
*To hard boil eggs: submerge eggs in boiling water and boil for 11 minutes. Drain and run with cold water. This will cook them properly without making the yolk blue or chalky.
** Shuck the fava beans from their pods, then blanch for 15 seconds in boiling water. Then, tear of the thin skin and a dark green fava bean will emerge. This hardly qualifies as cooking the legume.
*** All of the recipes I have encountered use whole anchovies, unchopped. You can chop them if you want.
So there you have it. This, along with some crunchy bread and sparkling water or chilled rosé wine is all you need on a hot day. I find this recipe much easier than the incorrect one I have been using all these years.
Mark Fantino 2002
You might notice in the photographs of the one I made today for my lunch I slice the red onion instead of dice. I wrote this recipe four years ago and in that time I changed my mind.