Salade Composée

I’ve developed traditions slowly, quietly, without even thinking about them. It takes an external person, someone who wasn’t there along the way with me, to comment on something that, to me, is second-nature, for me to remember that this might not be as normal to everyone as cherry blossoms in the springtime and vacation in the summer.

Many of these things boil down to food. Whether it’s making a big pot of tomato sauce when I move into a new apartment or eating plain tomatoes, salt and olive oil crushed on good bread all summer, there are certain things that are synonymous with seasons, which is why the other day, with Paris’ true springtime in the air, I boiled a huge pot of potatoes and got to work making this salade composée.

Growing up, salade nicoise featured on my mother’s table as soon as the weather got like this, when you once-and-for-all take your winter coat to the dry cleaners, where they package it up and you can store it for the winter. My mother has a huge stack of beautiful platters–I’ll admit to having added to that stack at Christmas and birthdays when I was young and had no better ideas of gifts–and one of them would come out, ceremoniously placed on the table and stacked high with green lettuced, sliced tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, barely cooked string beans, sliced new potatoes and tuna, all of it dressed with a creamy, beige dressing and scattered with tiny nicoise olives. We all picked out our favorites and tucked in for the only cold dinner that has never had that depressing quality of eating by yourself.

My mother came this weekend for one of her bi-annual Paris trips. “What did you do? Did you show her around?” people love to ask. What they don’t realize is that my mother and I have long abandoned the treks to fancy neighborhoods and tourist attractions in favor of shopping at tiny boutiques in the 6th and 18th and taking long, lazy dinners that sometimes last three hours and the entirety of a bottle of wine, just talking. It’s cliché, but I’ll go ahead and say it: my mother is probably my best friend. She knows me better than anyone, and as I’ve gotten older, I like to think I’ve learned more about her than I did when, nearly etheral, she would sit us all down to dinner each evening and watch as we inhaled the fruits of her labor, usually not taking a single bite.

This time around, we did make one stop at a tourist locale, for Palm Sunday mass at Notre Dame cathedral. We elbowed our way in, and I nearly had my phone taken off me as I texted the Country Boy to make sure he could find us before mass began. When it was over, we sat at an outside table at a small café in the fifth and devoured croque monsieurs, another tradition.

When my salade composée graced our dinner table a few nights ago, the Country Boy was surprised. I don’t blame him: salad is omnipresent here, but usually in the form of a side dish, simple greens dressed in vinaigrette. He didn’t complain, though, about the boiled eggs, the thick vinaigrette, the endless bowl of vegetables made into a meal with the effortless addition of tuna. I don’t know whose tradition it was before it was my mother’s, but now, early spring will always mean a salad like this one for me.

Salade Composée

2 hard-boiled eggs
500 g. new potatoes, cooked and cooled
250 g. cherry tomatoes
1/4 red onion
1/2 head leaf lettuce
1 small can tuna

1 egg
1 tsp. mustard
2 tsp. cider vinegar
1/2 tsp. salt
2-3 grinds fresh black pepper
2 tbsp. olive oil

Try to plan ahead and cook the eggs and potatoes ahead of time, so that they’re cool when you begin. If you can’t, cook and cool these. Slice the cooled eggs into quarters and the cooled potatoes into rounds.

Halve the cherry tomatoes and thinly slice the red onion.

Tear the lettuce into bite-sized pieces and place on a platter or large, shallow bowl. Organize the other ingredients on top as you see fit. Drain the tuna and add it to the salad.

For the dressing, place the egg in boiling water for 30 seconds. Immediately rinse under cold running water, crack and separate the yolk from the white. Discard the white, and place the yolk in a small bowl. Add the mustard, vinegar, salt and pepper, whisking all the while. Whisk in the olive oil. Dress the salad or serve on the side, according to your preference.