Les Entrées

Nowadays, the first course at any meal, whether or not preceded by soup, can take many forms. Apart from the traditional pâtés, there are the many forms of salade composée, combining green leaves with anything that comes to hand. These seem to have superseded the old-fashioned hors d’oeuvre trolley on which one used to find simple dishes of cold lentils, marinated raw fish, grated carrots, celeriac rémoulade, as well as charcuterie and tomatoes.

A salade composée may well contain a selection of such ingredients, but will inevitably lie on a bed of lettuce, so that the need for a plain green salad to precede or follow the main dish of the meal is short-circuited. A potato salad will not be dressed with a true mayonnaise, which is now hardly ever available commercially because they are based on tasteless oils rather than olive oil. Then there is the regrettable balsamic vinegar, which is used as a satanically coloured decoration on ingredients that do not call for it. At home you can avoid its use, and we will always do so in reliance on our own vinegar-maker, while realizing at that, for some people, traditional vinegars are hard to come by, especially a good quality plain white wine vinegar, which seems to be unobtainable in supermarkets.