Ring the changes by adding warm ingredients to your summer salads, writes Hugo Arnold
Readers of this column will have noted my enthusiasm for salad in recent weeks, and I make no apology for returning to the theme. This week I champion the warm salads beloved of so many French bistros. Those, and the endless variations on a green salad.
Oliva's passion is her garden. Weeding, watering and feeding are all in an evening's work for her, and nowhere is she happier. What a thrill to be offered rocket, two types of lettuce, pea shoots, fennel and celery leaves to work with as the evening sun disappears over a distant hilltop village in Emilia-Romagna in central Italy.
The pillow packets of salad leaves and herbs most of us have to contend with are nothing in comparison to this kind of product. Certainly the advantage of growing in sun-kissed central Italy helps, but even my own rocket at home is not far behind, in size certainly if not in peppery richness.
Oh, how I yearn for a vegetable patch. Oliva's is a square, with potatoes in this section, peas in another. It is hardly vast, perhaps five metres square, but it will feed the family of eight all summer and into autumn too. Pea risotto, pea soup, peas and pasta, crushed peas and mint. Can one ever tire of really fresh vegetables? Herbs are not in the vegetable patch, but dotted about the garden, a pot of rosemary here, the mint over there. Meat figures in many French bistro warm salads: geziers, duck confit and lardons for example. Vegetable versions, although perhaps not quite as enthusiastically received in meat-loving France, are no less wonderful to eat. Sautéed new potatoes, still-crispy asparagus spears, broad beans and peas all make for glorious salads when tossed with good olive oil, shallots and seasoning and a mixture of leaves, some sweet, some bitter and some just plain crunchy (although not iceberg, which was somebody's idea of a cruel joke).
Slightly unusual leaves such as dandelion make for a good contrast in colour, texture and bitterness, and they stand up to tossing in a hot pan. To ring the changes, different oils and vinegars provide variety. An oil from the north of Italy can contrast with one from the south. Use balsamic vinegar one day, and something more obviously winey another time. Herbs, too, such as tarragon and chives, chervil and parsley, help to ring the changes. It may be a salad every day, but never the same one. The difference is in the detail.