Salade Niçoise

Some simple classics are too good to try to improve on. The bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich. Pizza margherita. And salade niçoise. I’ve been making the same version of salade niçoise every summer for more than 40 years, since publication of the first volume in the Time-Life Foods of the World series, The Cooking of Provincial France, with author/consultant credits to M.F.K. Fisher, Michael Field, and Julia Child.

Sure, you can make a tasty summer vegetable salad with anything you like: peppers, radishes, cucumbers, onions, corn, beets, artichokes, broccoli . . . . I have no problem with those, as long as you use a good vinaigrette dressing. But I don’t call those salade niçoise. When I want that lovely dish, I go for the basics: tuna, tomatoes, potato salad, green beans, hardboiled eggs, anchovies, olives, and lettuce. What more does anyone need?!

The key for me is to use the best ingredients available. Those tomatoes are an heirloom variety from my greenmarket. The potatoes and flat Roman beans are also fresh from the greenmarket. The tuna is ventresca. By the way, if you don’t happen to know this Spanish or Italian import, it’s well worth looking for. Ventresca is the Rolls Royce of tunafish. It’s belly flesh – velvety textured, richly flavored, always packed in olive oil.

There are purists who say a true niçoise should have no cooked vegetables at all, which would rule out my potatoes and green beans. But I stoutly stick up for those two vegetables. I’ve even been known to use potato salad made with mayonnaise, which isn’t canonical (but good).

However, this week I faithfully followed the book’s recipe. I first sliced and then boiled the potatoes (usually I do it the other way around), tossed the slices very gently with some chicken stock, left them to absorb it, tossed them again with dry mustard and salt dissolved in wine vinegar, let that be absorbed, and finished the potatoes with extra virgin olive oil and parsley.

I boiled the green beans until just barely done and also boiled the eggs (evidently acceptable even to purists because though cooked they aren’t vegetables). Then I just assembled them on a base of Bibb lettuce, with the tomatoes, the ventresca, Moroccan oil-cured black olives, rinsed salt-packed anchovies, and a mildly mustardy vinaigrette.

For Tom and me, with a crusty baguette and a good bottle of wine (a lovely white Ravello from Marisa Cuomo, a fine small estate on the Amalfi coast), that was paradise enow.