Assorted Vegetable Salads

• How to Peel, Slice, and Chop a Variety of Vegetables
• How to Use Salt to get Excess Liquid out of Vegetables
• How to Make Mayonnaise
• How to Make Crème Fraîche

When living in Paris in the 1970s, I’d Tare Pilgrimages to the countryside and spend a week’s wages from my low-paying restaurant job on lunch in some famous and extravagant restaurant. These trips would often take a couple of days each way. I had to pinch pennies, and I was careful not to spend my lunch money just getting to the restaurant. Most of the time I’d hitchhike, which in the early days of my limited French might mean hours of silence in the cab of some unfortunate trucker who was dying for a little conversation. I’d stay at fleabag hotels and at youth hostels (at least French youth hostels would have a bar) and eat in the least expensive restaurants I could find along the way. While often far from great, these little local places sometimes provided me with a deeper sense of the roots of French cooking than I’d find at the luxury spot where I was heading. The menus usually included regional specialties, and when my French got better I’d get to chat with French families and traveling salesmen, since customers often shared tables. I enjoyed the hustle and bustle after a day spent mostly alone with my thumb out. But what I remember most about these simple meals is the abundant platter of assorted vegetable salads—l’assiette de crudités—offered as a way to start dinner. Usually the waiter or waitress would set the platter next to my table and let me serve myself as much as I wanted. I’d linger as long as I could, munching vegetables and sipping a cool local wine.