Forever Summer (10 page)

Authors: Nigella Lawson

BOOK: Forever Summer

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But to return to the case in hand: when you want to eat, get started with the rest
of the salad. Cut the tomatoes into quarters, then cut each quarter into quarters (always lengthwise) again, so that you have a collection of very fine segments (rather than chunks). Sprinkle the sugar and a pinch of salt over them and leave while you get on with the rest. Wash the lettuce if you need to (I always try and get away with not) tear into big pieces and put into a large, wide salad bowl. Slice the fennel and add that, then the olives and the feta, cut or crumbled into rough chunks, and toss well. Now add the tomatoes, the red onion – now lucidly pink – in its marinade-dressing and the lemon juice. Toss gently, but thoroughly, so that everything is well combined.

This is addictive: you will find yourself making it all through summer – and beyond.

Serves 6–8.

PUY LENTIL, GOAT’S CHEESE AND MINT SALAD

There is something about the resonant graininess of pulses that, when eaten at balmy room temperature, makes me think immediately of a lingering, wide-skied, late-summer supper. You can pretty well fiddle about with this as you wish: if you want to use feta in place of chèvre, fine by me; equally, coriander works well instead of mint (both dried and fresh); forget the sweet, soft peppers if you want; add some chopped fresh tomatoes if the idea appeals. I’m easy. So should you be. But there is one unignorable stipulation: you must use proper, authentic Puy lentils, not any other type or even healthstore-packaged ones thus erroneously, and misleadingly, named. The real things are from France and the box bears the stamp of authentication: it’s not that other varieties are lesser, they just get fuzzy around the edges on cooking and this salad loses a little of its appeal when an element of sludge is introduced.

275g goat’s cheese (about 6cm cut from a goat’s cheese log, approx. 8cm in diameter)

1 lemon

8 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon dried mint

500g Puy lentils

1 onion

3–4 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon chilli oil

Maldon salt

1 x 325g jar sweet peppers in oil

bunch fresh mint, chopped

Crumble the goat’s cheese and marinate in the juice and zest of half the lemon, half the olive oil and the dried mint.

Put the lentils in a large saucepan of water and add the onion, halved, along with the garlic cloves and chilli oil. Cook for about 25 minutes or until tender – be certain to check after about 18 minutes and then drain.

Pour the remaining olive oil over the warm lentils, season with salt, and add the juice and zest of the remaining half lemon. Drain the peppers and mix them into the lentils, which I find easiest to do with my hands; for one thing, it makes you less likely to crush the lentils.

When the salad has reached room temperature, add the marinated goat’s cheese and sprinkle over the fresh chopped mint.

Serves 6–8.

ITALIAN BEETROOT SALAD

I came across this in the great late Jane Grigson’s
Vegetable Book
, and it serves as a reminder that we, like children, need to be shaken out of our squeamish food prejudices. There’s something about the flabby, sweet, cooked flesh of beetroot that’s always slightly spooked me but the robust simplicity of this – the plain, but striking arrangement of just beetroot, onion, mint, olive oil and red wine vinegar – has made me override, completely, my raw-beetroot-salad-only rule.

You do have to be picky about the beetroot, though. Buy it cooked by all means, but make sure it’s not lethally macerated in brine or vinegar; vacuum-packed is fine, and these tend to be smaller and nuttier in taste than those monstrous globes I remember from school.

As in the
Greek Salad
, I like to steep the red onion rings in the vinegar for a while first. To be frank, a quarter of an hour is probably enough to stave off acridness and bring all that glimmering pinkness to the fore which, against the garnet darkness of the beets, produces a satisfaction of its own.

We might not initially consider mint to be a characteristically Italian ingredient, but that is largely because of the culinary domination of the cooking of Northern Italy in recent years: in the South, mint grows in the wild and finds its way, as a matter of course, into the kitchen.

I love this salad particularly with cold duck; a little grated orange zest, sprinkled along with the mint, wouldn’t go amiss in this partnership either.

1 red onion

2 x 15ml tablespoons red wine vinegar

8 large or 16 small cooked beetroot (about 750g)

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

3 tablespoons of chopped fresh mint

Maldon salt

Peel the onion and cut it into fine rings, then sit these rings in a shallow bowl and spoon over the red wine vinegar. Cover with clingfilm and leave to steep for at least a quarter of an hour or for up to three.

Slice the beetroot and arrange these rounds on a large plate, top gracefully with the onion rings, pouring over any vinegar from the bowl and then drizzle over the oil and sprinkle with the mint and Maldon salt.

Serves 4–6.

WATERMELON, FETA AND BLACK OLIVE SALAD

As improbable as it might sound, this combination is utterly fantastic, both savoury and refreshing at the same time. You can pare it down to the essential contrast, and serve no more than a plate of chunked watermelon, sprinkled with feta and mint and spritzed with lime, but this full-length version is hardly troublesome to make and once made will, I assure you, become a regular feature of your summer table.

1 small red onion

2–4 limes, depending on juiciness

1.5 kg sweet, ripe watermelon

250g feta cheese

bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley

bunch fresh mint, chopped

3–4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

100g pitted black olives

black pepper

Peel and halve the red onion and cut into very fine half-moons and put in a small bowl to steep with the lime juice, to bring out the transparent pinkness in the onions and diminish their rasp. Two limes’ worth should do it, but you can find the fruits disappointingly dried up and barren when you cut them in half, in which case add more.

Remove the rind and pips from the watermelon, and cut into approximately 4cm triangular chunks, if that makes sense (maths is not my strong point). Cut the feta into similar sized pieces and put them both into a large, wide shallow bowl. Tear off sprigs of parsley so that it is used like a salad leaf, rather than a garnish, and add to the bowl along with the chopped mint.

Tip the now glowingly puce onions, along with their pink juices over the salad in the bowl, add the oil and olives, then using your hands toss the salad very gently so that the feta and melon don’t lose their shape. Add a good grinding of black pepper and taste to see whether the dressing needs more lime. Hava Negila! The taste of Tel Aviv sunshine!

Serves 8.

FETA, WALNUT AND HERB SALAD

I call this a salad, with the excuse that these sorts of grainy pastes are often thus described in Greece and the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean from where, give or take, this emanates, but the real reason is that in the struggle between ‘dip’ and ‘purée’, neither won out. I urgently needed to convey to you the simple freshness, the raw-depthed flavour, of this combination: once you make it (I won’t begin to call it cooking) you’ll be convinced, but I didn’t want any unseemly word to get in the way before you even start. You might now gather that, however it’s named, it’s best eaten by sludging it over chunks of raw vegetable, or just by dipping them into it.

25g each of: fresh mint, parsley and basil

200g feta cheese

200g shelled walnuts, chopped

6 spring onions

1 clove garlic

half teaspoon salt

pepper

1 tablespoon lime juice

60ml olive oil

Process all of the above to make a grainy paste. That’s it. What are you waiting for?

Serves 4–6 with cruditées.