Summer Salad I: Endive and Sugar-Snap Peas with Parmesan-Lime Vinaigrette

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One might think that, at least in summer, salad needs no recipe.  

Melissa Clark in the New York Times last week advised readers that the best response to the glut of summer tomatoes is to make a salad freelance.  Our market encourages this kind of cooking as well:  cut up tomatoes in a range of hues and shapes, dress them with olive oil and perhaps a little vinegar, herbs, salt and pepper; perhaps add cheese (Nicasio’s Foggy Morning is a great choice) or whatever else catches your fancy.  This is the hunter-gatherer mode of salad making.  

As herbalist John Parkinson wrote in the seventeenth century, the “usual manner” of making salads is  “to take the young buds and leaves of everything almost that groweth, as well in the gardens as in the fields, and put them together.”   Most of the time we do exactly this, attending to the composition of colors and flavors but thinking of our job, as Parkinson says, as “taking” any of the season's richness that is to hand and “putting it together.”

The composed salad earns its name through a little more attention to what goes in and what is left out and it is here that recipes can be a boon, suggesting surprising combinations of ingredients or dressings with more complexity than oil and vinegar.  This kind of salad makes us think of another seventeenth-century writer, John Evelyn, who devoted a whole book to salad making, Acetaria:  A Discourse of Sallets (1699), elevating it to a high art.  

Sir Godfrey Kneller, John Evelyn, 1687

Evelyn insists that "in the Composure of a Sallet, every Plant should come in to bear its part, without being over-power'd by some Herb of a stronger Taste, so as to endanger the native Savor and Vertue of the rest; but fall into their places, like the Notes in Music, in which there should be nothing harsh or grating:  And tho admitting some Discords (to distinguish and illustrate the rest) striking in the more sprightly, and sometimes gentler Notes, reconcile all Dissonancies, and melt them into an agreeable Composition."  This is a high bar.  Evelyn's ideal salad-maker is Milton's Eve, whom he envisions as a kind of artist drawing on the bounty of Paradise to prepare a meal for the angel Raphael.

Abundance compels careful selection and Eve is intent

What choice to choose, for delicacy best,

What order so contrived as not to mix

Tastes not well joined, inelegant, but bring

Taste after taste, upheld by kindliest change.

While she selects and combines with care,  she "heaps with unsparing hand."   If one remembers the rest of the story, one might find Eve a somewhat ironic guide to choosing produce; but Evelyn has led us to make her our guide. 

In this post and the next, we'll share two recipes that have upped our salad game, one using ingredients that are almost always at the market and the other ingredients of this high summer moment. 

The first recipe comes from Jean-Georges: Cooking At Home with a Four-Star Chef, co-authored by Jean-Georges Vonderichten and Mark Bittman.  Since here we primarily devote ourselves to the pleasures of the so-called “local,” this may seem an ironic or even inappropriate choice.  For Jean-Georges is the very instance of an international “celebrity chief” — the author of five well known cookbooks, including the immensely influential Simple Cuisine, and the chef or proprietor of numerous restaurants around the globe, including his flagship Jean-Georges in New York’s Trump Tower, and other restaurants in London, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and elsewhere.   

In such venues, the same uncomfortable questions to which we alluded in one of our first posts inevitably emerge again.  To speak of food, of cooking, of cuisine (and what is the difference between these anyway?  When does “food” become “cuisine”?  And when does “cuisine” end and mere “cooking” begin?) is inevitably to participate in a global market system, or in so-called “globalization” itself, as Jean George’s own cuisine, which mixes Asian and European flavors, itself seems deliberately to suggest.  Here, we can’t help recall David Cross’s brilliant bit about dining at Jean-Georges in New York, where he tasted the famous dessert in which chocolate cake is topped with real gold leaf — or, as Cross puts it: “tasteless, odorless gold … to eat!  Was there ever a better way to say f-you to poor people?”

As usual, there is no escape from such qualms and questions. But we must confess that our suspicion of celebrity chefs and destination restaurants coexists, uneasily, with a weakness for their cookbooks.  We can’t help liking the book named above, and especially this salad, which is simplicity itself and yet seems unusual in its juxtaposition of unexpected ingredients.  

We’ve previously mentioned California Vegetable Specialties, which grows both red and white endive in Rio Vista, CA, bringing them year round to the Davis Farmers Market (our readers may recall our winter salad of apples, endives and walnuts).  This salad also showcases sugar snap peas from Rancho Cortez in Santa Maria.  (Rancho Cortez has no sign and is listed among the market vendors as Guevara/Cortez/LVL produce.  But they are at the market every week, every season, with a wonderful range of produce, down at the end of the stall near the prepared food and musicians.  In their anonymity and reliability, they are the opposite of Jean-Georges.)  Sugar snap peas are round pea-pods that are entirely edible, like the flatter snow peas: and both are denoted by the memorable French word mangetout.  Here, these two are paired and dressed with a parmesan vinaigrette with the unexpected addition of a little fresh lime juice. 

Endive and Sugar Snap Pea salad with Parmesan Lime Vinaigrette

Trim and peel 8 oz. of sugar snap peas.  (We snap the ends off with our fingers, pulling and removing the strings on both sides.)

Drop into boiling water for about 30 seconds.  They should still be bright green and with a little chew.  Drain and put into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking.

Dry on a clean kitchen towel or paper towel.  Carefully cut each pea lengthwise on a diagonal, producing long horseshoe-shaped pieces combined with tiny peas.

Trim four endives (it's nice to combine red and green if possible), removing and discarding the core, separating the leaves, and discarding any discolored or tough-looking ones. 

In a blender (or a bowl), combine:

-       2 tbsp champagne vinegar

-       1 tbsp lime juice

-       2/3 tsp Dijon mustard

-       generous ¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

-       about 1/4 cup chopped fresh herbs, such as dill, tarrgon, basil, parsley, or a combination

With the motor running (or while whisking) add slowly:

-       1 ½ tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

-       2 tbsp neutral oil such as canola

Arrange endive on a plate and lightly toss with dressing.  In a separate bowl, dress the cut sugar snap peas, then spoon on top.  Top with a little extra dressing (you’ll probably want to use most or even all of it) and a little more chopped fresh herb.

(You can also spoon the sugar snap salad into individual endive leaves for a finger food.)

The endive pea salad has an appetizing quality that makes it a great starter, giving a rush of contrasting colors, shapes, textures and flavors.