For most of my adult life, I never knowingly ate a vinaigrette. I never made one unless explicitly told to do so by a recipe. I liked salads, but I prepared them in what I regarded as the Italian way, with good olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and sea salt. In this, I was arrogant to a point of self-righteousness; after all, I’d say, what tastes better than good olive oil?
Then, about ten years ago, after moving to Lyon with my wife, Jessica, and twin toddlers, I was changed by two events. The first involved our young George, who returned from a day at L’École Robert Doisneau, the public school that he and his brother attended, full of enthusiasm for the canteen lunch. “Mama,” he declared, “I ate the most amazing new food! It was called une salade and had a delicious sauce. Can we have that at home?” (Mama was understandably proud.) The second event was six months later. I was working as a lowly stagiaire in the kitchen of a renowned local restaurant, La Mère Brazier, and had persuaded the chef, Mathieu Viannay, to let me try out for a position cooking on the line. The audition involved my preparing the daily staff lunch—le personnel, or what is called the “family meal” in U.S. restaurant kitchens. On Day One, I was told the basic menu—a protein (short ribs), a red-wine sauce, a starch, “and a salad with a vinaigrette—of course.”
Of course. A vinaigrette. I contemplated the how-to: oil and vinegar, obviously, with more oil than vinegar. But how much more? And mustard, no? And what else? And how would this highly particular, very Lyonnais, belligerently French culinary rear-guard crowd of cooks (my diners) make their own vinaigrette? I pictured them tasting mine—it was bound to be wrong—and spitting it on the floor.
“The vinaigrette,” I said and paused. “Um, uh, how exactly do you make that?”
Viannay looked confused. “You don’t know how to make a vinaigrette?”
“Well, yes, of course I know. But I don’t know how you make it here. In Lyon.”
As I’m sure everyone else knows, a basic French vinaigrette begins, first and foremost, with a small spoon of Dijon mustard, then salt, and then one part vinegar to three parts oil (often one of the lighter kinds, like canola). You dissolve the mustard and the salt in the vinegar, mixing with a whisk, then add the oil slowly until you have an “emulsion”—the creamy “third” solution that arises when two otherwise incompatible liquids (like oil and water) agree to hang out together.
In the aftermath, and in what I now regard as a defensive repair job of my self-esteem, I quickly became an obsessed vinaigrette know-it-all. Maybe too quickly. I recall an exchange with Jessica—it was only a week or two later—after I had recoiled from a salad that we’d just been served at our local bistro, put down my fork, and declared, “That is a very loose interpretation of a vinaigrette.”
“So now you’re an expert?” she asked in her easy, withering way.
To be fair, what I had finally come to appreciate was the appeal of vinegar. Our bistro dressing hadn’t enough of it.
Vinegar can be made from just about any fermented liquid—e.g., from fruit, like apples, or a starch, like potatoes—but, in France, it usually comes from grapes. So does the word. Vinegar is what wine becomes when it is left out in the air and spoils—the word comes from vin, “wine,” plus aigre, “sour, bitter.” The process wasn’t widely understood until Louis Pasteur published studies of it in the eighteen-sixties, but, regardless, vinegar had already been widely established for centuries as a fundamental of the French kitchen, pour l’acidité—for the acidity. Today the phrase is repeated relentlessly at French cooking schools. Poaching a fish, you add a shot of white vinegar—pour l’acidité. You start your béarnaise with it—pour l’acidité. Your red-wine sauce, your braised pork, your bœuf bourguignonne, your ratatouille. Pour l’acidité, l’acidité, l’acidité.
Today my go-to vinaigrette is made, no surprise, with a base of wine vinegar. I also use grapeseed oil, at least in part for the symmetry of knowing that both my vinegar and my oil come from grapes. (Grapeseed oil is now widely available in the United States but was especially easy to get, in bulk, when we lived in the Rhône Valley, the corridor of some of the most delicious fermented beverages of France.) The vinaigrette that Daniel Boulud uses in his restaurants is the same, except that it includes garlic. He learned the recipe from his grandmother when he was growing up on a farm—it was what she served on just-picked lettuces—and I like that, too, knowing that his simple rustic dressing, handed down for centuries, is the one that he now serves at his upmarket restaurants in New York City.
Once you have mastered a vinaigrette’s basic formula (mustard, acid, fat, salt), you can play with it—introducing a fruit element, like cherry or balsamic vinegar for red beets, say, or something lighter for the golden ones, perhaps a sherry vinegar, with an additional splash of white wine or a squeeze of citrus. I first experimented with using passion fruit when considering how to serve a plate of endives, the crisp, slightly bitter white-leafed member of the chicory family. For me, the dressing was a modest revelation and yet another lesson in the lifelong education of learning which flavors go with what.
Conventionally, endive is prepared with walnuts (which my wife is allergic to) and blue cheese, usually Roquefort (which, alas, I can’t tolerate). I considered dressing it with a vinaigrette, but vinaigrettes seem to flatter delicate summer greens. Endive is not delicate. I found instruction among its hearty cousins. Frisée, for instance, which is often called a lettuce but is actually a chicory (it’s the one that looks like scrawny leaves having a bad hair day), is the principal ingredient in a salade Lyonnaise, and is served with lardons—bits of rendered pork belly—which seem to tame its bitter bite. Dandelion, which is a relative of the chicory clan (its leaves are so bitter that you normally eat them only when young), is often served in a dressing of anchovies. The lesson: strong flavors seem to call for comparably strong flavors.
Passion fruit, of course, is more often dessert than dinner, but its fruitiness seems to complement the endive’s bitterness (akin to how sweet often works with sour). I could have used oranges or apples, even pears, but, like everyone else in my family, I had fallen hard for the luxury of a tropical fruit in the wintertime. (One of the happy fortuities of Lyon was that passion fruit—which often came from the French-speaking island of Réunion—was widely available.)
I use at least two fruits, which are bald and purple and hard on the outside but surprisingly vivid and aromatic within. I cut them in half and scoop out the pulp and seeds. The pulp tastes like a tangy tropical custard. (I also use a passion-fruit vinegar, which includes even more pulp.) The seeds are dark and round, like small dried currants, and burst with a peppery intensity when bitten into. You spoon the dressing onto each endive leaf, a brightly orange puddle, but not too much, because you don’t want it tipping out when you pick one up with your fingers. This is another crucial feature. You eat the salad with your hands.
There is, I now see, another feature at work in the combination of chicory and passion fruit. The endive is northern, and, starved of sunshine, is white like wintry clouds before they snow. It is planted in dark cellars in the fall, harvested by hand directly from its muddy case in the winter; in the markets in Lyon, the farmers dig them out with their trowels. Then to dress the leaves with an equatorial fruit evocative of blue skies and green seas and balmy ease? It is transporting.
I find myself thinking of my son George’s first salad, the amazing “sauce” on his salade. What is a sauce? A liquid composition, often an emulsion, that complements the food it is served with. It is not the main event. It enhances it. Yes, a sauce might be made with red wine or butter or pan juices from a roasted bird. But it can also be made with vinegar and fat—and even fruit. Young George understood this before I did.
Once you have mastered a vinaigrette’s basic formula—mustard, acid, fat, salt—you can learn to play with it.
Basic French Vinaigrette
Serves 6
Ingredients
- Salt, to taste
- ½ garlic clove, smashed and finely diced
- 1 tsp. Dijon mustard
- 2 Tbsp. white-wine vinegar
- 3 Tbsp. grapeseed oil or canola oil
- 3 Tbsp. olive oil
- Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Directions
1. Using a fork, mash the salt into the garlic. Add mustard and vinegar, and whisk until blended.
