Salad

When we were visiting Galimard, one of the perfume factories in Grasse, our guide was an adorable young French girl with huge hazel eyes named Cyrielle Charpentier. After we finished the tour, learning about the flowers from around Grasse that go into perfumes, Cyrielle let us try some of the essences. Noticing a chai, the Jewish symbol for “life,” on a chain around her neck, we asked her if she was Jewish, and she said that she was. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, and her mother, an Italian Jew who also suffered during the war, lived near Grasse. When I asked her what foods she liked, she immediately named her grandmother’s tchoukchouka, a North African dish with tomatoes, peppers, and sometimes eggplant. The purists’ versions of tchoukchouka, this salade cuite, include lots of garlic and no onions, but I have seen some with onions as well. The beauty of this delicious recipe is that it is prepared in advance and tastes even better the next day, especially helpful for the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays, when cooking is prohibited and there is little time to prepare food—you do not have to fuss with a last-minute salad. It can also be used as a base for an egg or sausage dish, and is great as a sauce over pasta.

This is one of the salads that I make frequently. For some reason, although people always ask me how I make it, I have never put the recipe in any of my cookbooks. Grilling the peppers softens the pulp and brings out the natural sweetness. Sometimes the peppers are mixed with eggplants and tomatoes in North African salads, such as the salade juive (recipe follows) or the tchoukchouka (see page 94). Sometimes they are served alone. For Rosh Hashanah and dinner parties, I love to serve the colorful combination of red peppers, carrot salad (see page 112), and roasted beet salad (see page 108).

When I embark on a cookbook, it’s like going on a scavenger hunt. One clue leads to another. Sometimes they lead to unexpected findings, such as this wonderful cooked salad of Jewish origins. Someone in Washington had told me that Élisabeth Bourgeois, the chef and owner of Le Mas Tourteron, a restaurant just outside of Gordes, in the Lubéron, was Jewish. One Sunday afternoon, a friend and I drove two hours from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to the charming stone house with old wooden beams and antique furniture that is her restaurant. Although I had no idea what mas tourteron meant, an atmosphere of bonhomie filled this farmhouse (mas) of lovebirds (tourterons) as soon as Élisabeth and her husband greeted us. When I explained my quest to Élisabeth, asking her if she was Jewish, she replied, “Pas du tout” (“Not at all”). I thought our journey would be for naught, but since we arrived at lunchtime, we sat down to eat. And what a meal we had! Our first course was a trio of tiny late-summer vegetables served in individual cups on a long glass platter: a cucumber salad with crème fraîche and lots of chives and mint; a cold zucchini cream soup; and a luscious ratatouille-like tomato salad, the third member of the trio. When I asked Élisabeth for the recipe for this last dish, she said without hesitation, “Ça, c’est la salade juive!” (“That is the Jewish salad!”) She explained that the recipe came from a Moroccan Jewish woman who had worked in her kitchen for about thirty years. Now it is part of her summer cooking repertoire and mine. This recipe calls for coriandre, a word that the French use for both the fresh leaves and the seeds of the coriander or cilantro plant. This dish uses both. I serve it either as a salad or as a cold pasta sauce, and make it during every season, even with canned tomatoes in winter. It is always a hit.

The first time I tasted a simple French lettuce salad of greens tossed in a mustardy vinaigrette, I marveled at how uncomplicated and delicious it was. Presented after the main course, as is traditional in Europe, the lettuce dish cleanses the palate. In France, with its varied climate and wonderful produce, salad greens are in season all year long and have been eaten forever, both cooked and raw. Serve as is, or with chopped fresh basil, cilantro, dill, tarragon, or chives sprinkled on top. Tiny slices of radish are a nice addition and, according to the Talmud, help digest lettuce.

This yogurt relish comes from the Tamil communities of Sri Lanka and is called Curd Sambol. It may be served with most South Asian meals. It may also be eaten at lunch as a salad.

This Sri Lankan sambol may best be described as an accompanying salad or relish to be served at curry meals. You can make it as hot as you like.

There were many salad-like dishes made with seasonal fruit that my mother served with our lunches. If guavas were in season, they were pressed into service; it could also be star fruit, bananas, peaches, green mangoes, whatever was available in abundance. The seasonings in these salads did not vary much—salt, pepper, ground roasted cumin, Indian chili powders, made from red chilies and sometimes yellow chilies as well, sugar as needed, and lime juice. My mother made the salads herself, not in the kitchen but in the pantry and at the very last minute, just as we sat down to eat, so the fruit would not start “weeping” and get all watery. The seasoning amounts given in this recipe are approximate, since the taste of fruit can vary so much. Keep tasting as you go, adding more or less of the seasonings, as desired.

My North Indian family called this salaad, or salad, but similar salads with varying seasonings are known in some parts of India as cachumbar. These salads generally contain onions (our Indian red onions), cucumbers, and tomatoes but, according to the seasons, we in Delhi could find radishes or kohlrabi in them as well. In some parts of India, barely sprouted mung beans and peanuts could be added. This fresh salad was always at our table at every meal in some form, with the simplest of dressings added at the last minute. There was never any oil in this dressing. Instead, there was fresh lime juice, salt, pepper, chili powder, and ground roasted cumin seeds. We just put a generous dollop on our plates (or side plates) and ate it with everything.

In much of India, a fresh salad is present at every single meal. This kind of cucumber salad was something that my mother threw together moments before we sat down to eat. Cucumbers with tiny undeveloped seeds have the best texture, but when cucumbers are growing wildly in my garden and some that hid themselves too successfully among the leaves have grown beyond the best picking size, I pick them anyway, peel them, and scoop out their seeds. They still make good eating. (Whenever I pick a particularly large, overgrown cucumber, I can never throw it in the compost heap because I think of Inder Dutt. At the age of thirteen, he came down from a poor village in the Himalayan mountains to try to eke out a living in the plains. In Delhi, he somehow managed to get into a cousin’s household where they taught him how to do odd jobs and eventually even how to cook. He became so adept that my cousin brought him to New York as her cook. Every now and then he would come over to our apartment to help out. I could never get enough of the stories about his childhood. He had spent the snowy mountain winters without shoes, huddling in the floor above the animals to stay warm at night. In the summers, he had to go work in the fields. When he got very thirsty, he would just pick the largest cucumber he could find, snap it in two, and quench his thirst with its juicy flesh.)

There are hundreds of versions of this salad-like dish that are eaten throughout South India and parts of western India as well. At its base is rice, the local starch and staple. (Think of the bread soups of Italy and the bread salads of the Middle East.) The rice is cooked so it is quite soft. Then yogurt, and sometimes a little milk as well, is added as well as any fruit (apple, grapes, pomegranate), raw vegetables (diced tomatoes, cucumbers), or lightly blanched vegetables (green beans, zucchini, peas) that one likes. The final step is what makes the salad completely Indian. A tiny amount of oil is heated and spices such as mustard seeds, curry leaves, and red chilies are thrown into it. Then the seasoned oil is poured over the rice salad to give it its pungency and reason for being. This cooling, soothing dish, somewhat like a risotto, makes a wonderful lunch. It is best served at room temperature, without being refrigerated. Other salads may be added to the meal.

Here is an everyday carrot dish. In India it is served hot, but I often serve it cold in the summer, almost like a carrot salad.

This is particularly delicious with grilled fish.