Seafood Salads

French cookbooks abound with seafood salads. Escoffier’s are elegant and hopelessly extravagant: salade favorite is made by tossing equal parts of crayfish tails, white truffle slices, and white asparagus tips with lemon juice and olive oil (it’s not hard to figure out how it got its name); salade hollandaise contains cubes of smoked salmon, cubes of potato, minced onion, and caviar; salade japonaise combines diced herring fillets, poached oysters, sliced potatoes, and truffle slices; salade mignon calls for tossing together shrimp tails, cubes of cooked artichoke bottoms, and truffle slices in a mayonnaise-crème fraîche combination (sounds like a winner). The list goes on.