Summer smooch
I photographed this salad meal the other day, but the photos were unsuccessful. It was no bother at all to re-make the meal and shoot it again, because I have happily eaten this four times this week.
It was inspired by my to-this-date favorite food writer, M.F.K. Fisher. I am leaving the top spot vulnerable to someone new, just in case, but for now she’s still up there. I’ve been rereading her books lately, and her descriptions of foods that one could easily get and eat during WWII included this great salad. I take exception, however, to her green beans as remembered from Venice. “as long as your thumb and barely thicker than a hair…” I grow my own green beans, have grown several kinds over the years, and the barely thicker than a hair just doesn’t happen in my experience. In seeking the effect I have picked green beans so small they fell through the holes in my colander, but they were already a good bit thicker than a hair and besides they didn’t taste like green beans. Fisher must be forgiven, because usually when she waxes lyrical you know exactly what she means and you would have said it the same way if it had occurred to you.
I was going to publish a scan of her photograph on the cover of my book. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, with perfect bones, a mouth drawn on by a master and a steady gaze to engage you. She had her own style and for good or ill she kept it until she died. I planned to dazzle you with this image of her in her thirties, but Mr. Henry beat me to it! I call that really strange, that two different people on different continents should have the impulse to publish the exact same thing about a woman now gone for years.
My salad is made up largely of what is growing on this farm at this moment. It has different things at different meals. This one doesn’t have any of my delicious cucumbers nor any beets, which I have to buy already cooked and shrink-wrapped from France. This one has no onion for the first time. I’ve been finding tiny cauliflowers lately, so they generally have that, and even though our new potatoes are not small and cannot be left whole, I like to include them every time.
Today’s salad has some ceci/garbanzos I cooked. It has a tiny zucchine left whole, and some of my green beans. I have to buy the radishes as it is far too hot here for them to form roots, but I do insist on them.
What is really great about this salad, for me, is that I can prepare and cook the vegetables early in the morning or late at night when it is cool, then drain and keep them in the refrigerator to be eaten when the sun is pouring 100 plus degrees on my head. I just take them out to come to room temperature, make a vinaigrette and assemble that which I feel like eating. I have been enjoying a very chilled glass of a rosé wine from Puglia with it.
Summer food can be also very lavish and memorable. I remember lobsters on the coast of my home state, Maine. My only taste of foie gras was in summer near Lyon. Moules frites are pretty much a summer thing, at least in my life. Beach food and street food smells and tastes are summer memories. I think, though, when you come right down to it, a plate full of the freshest and best summer vegetables is hard to beat. There is not another time in the year when this tastes just like it tastes now. Eat it.
2 comments August 9th, 2008
