Notes

Beans and potatoes?

Authenticity is a tedious concept for a food writer. Dishes are in constant four-dimensional motion, changing ingredients and processes all the time, so if you want to make a particular version of a dish – in this case, a salad – from a particular place and a moment in time and call it “authentic”, that’s fine, but you need to know that there’s no single “authentic” version of any dish.

If I ordered a salad nicoise and received something without beans and potatoes, I don’t think it would cut it.

Jacques Medecin, who, aside from being the former mayor of Nice, also published the definitive book on Nicoise cuisine, wrote that the salad should be mainly tomatoes, the dressing should just be olive oil (not a vinaigrette), and that the only cooked ingredients are the boiled eggs. That said, Medicin was also a famously enthusiastic supporter of South African apartheid and was imprisoned for corruption. He died in disgrace after fleeing to Uruguay, so maybe we can take his views with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, the godfather of modern French cuisine, Auguste Escoffier, included the now-ubiquitous cooked potatoes and beans in his version. (By the by, Escoffier was also fired by London’s Savoy Hotel for massive fraud, but he was never actually imprisoned for it.)

Without writing a thesis on nicoise salads throughout history, if I ordered a salad nicoise and received something without the beans and potatoes we all now expect, I don’t think it would cut it. I use crisp blanched beans and tender potatoes in my nicoise and suggest that you do, too.

Cold water potatoes

Potatoes are high in starch and when starch granules are heated in the presence of water (such as by boiling), they swell. As the potatoes cook from the outside in, these swollen starch granules insulate the potato, making it hard for heat to penetrate to the centre. For this reason, it’s always best to start potatoes in cold water so that it cooks more evenly before the external starch begins to swell.

That said, new potatoes are lower in starch than the grown-up version, and cooking them in their skins helps to reduce water absorption. But regardless, starting potatoes in cold water is a good habit to get into.

Blanching

This is going to sound like heresy, but I am not a blancher. That is to say, I don’t “shock” vegetables in cold or iced water after I’ve boiled them.

The idea behind shocking something in cold water is that it stops the cooking process so that the vegetables don’t overcook. I’ve never seen the point. I just take the vegetables out of the water before they’re completely cooked and let them steam themselves to complete the cooking.

It doesn’t matter too much with beans, but for things like broccoli that can hold a lot of water between the floret buds, taking them from hot, seasoned water and plunging them into cold, unseasoned water makes them taste watery (and makes them cold, which is not usually what we’re after anyway). I mean, you don’t shock a steak in cold water after grilling it, do you?

If you still feel you have to shock your vegetables, at least season the cold water you’re using to shock them.

Mixed or composed

A “composed” salad is one where the ingredients are arranged on a plate, so that the person eating can graze across the selection of ingredients and pick each mouthful. This has the advantage of making a meal a little more interesting, as each mouthful can be different.

A mixed salad is fairly straightforward, and its advantage is that by tossing the salad, you get more complete coverage with the dressing. The French way is to make the dressing in the base of your salad bowl and then add your leaves on top before tossing, which saves on washing up.

Some like to mix nicoise salads, but I think a composed salad, with each ingredient presented separately, is a much better way to do it.