Salad Nicoise

This week I had some stray green beans left from my produce box and I wasn't sure what to do with them. Coincidentally, we also had some leftover boiled small red potatoes. You what I was thinking? I was thinking Salad Nicoise! Composed salads are great fun and also an excellent way to use up extra veggies. Plus composed salads look awesome and you can serve them to guests without it appearing you are serving leftovers. (Heads up to future guests. If you see a composed salad, you are seeing last night's dinner.)

When I make a composed salad, I always just use my everyday vinaigrette, which I usually have on hand. But I wanted tonight's dinner to be special, so conjured all my inner Frenchness and made a nice vinaigrette with lemon, Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, shallot, and then I added the oil slowly while whisking to emulsify. It was great. It might even become my everyday dressing.

I took at peek at Mastering the Art of French Cooking for salad pointers and mine was pretty spot-on with Julia's but hers had anchovies, so I added them to mine and I have to say, they made all the difference. I wish every meal of leftovers could be so luxurious. Another of her pointers that I've taken to heart is always use tuna packed in oil. She's right about that one. Tuna packed in water tastes like dust.

Gourmet: The Magazine of Good Living

I have fallen down the freakin' rabbit hole. This food and nostalgia research project has been great fun and is yielding rocking essays, but once in a while I feel as if I am losing my grip on reality. A couple of months ago my friend Martha gave me a 1961 issue of Gourmet Magazine that someone had left at her restaurant (that I've mentioned before, where I used to work called The Sisters). Anyway, I was completely enthralled. Despite its stinky mustiness, I read every single page. Cover to cover. Including the ads. Immediately I got on eBay and bought a full five years: 1961-1965 including index.

Honest to god, I swore I wasn't going to blog about this. It was too easy. Too nostalgic. The magazine is rife with juicy tidbits. There could be a whole blog just about this.

I have now read all of '61 and of '62. The thing is, when you immerse yourself in the media and culture of a specific era some of it rubs off. We've heard this argument a million times about pornography and violence. Well, I hate to stand here in the camp of Andrea Dworkin, but after what must be two years of reading Culinary Arts Institute cookbooks, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), and now two years worth of Gourmet, I find myself inured to the likes of aspic (see picture).

Other things are happening too. I decant my half and half into a glass container. Organ meats, which I loved as a child, are now regaining their appeal. We use only cloth napkins. And as I've mentioned aspic has started to look appealing. Perhaps it is too much Dick Van Dyke Show.

Oh, and did I mention that I bought all of 1948 in a single bound volume. Do I see an intervention?