Let’s get one thing straight right from the start: there is nothing crude about crudités. This lovely fresh vegetable plate — my all-time favorite starter — is the dish I most long for whenever I’m away from France for a while. There is something quintessentially French in the way the vegetables are prettily arranged in mounds, then topped with a zesty sauce. It’s so fresh it feels like visiting a garden – and finding it on your plate.
Assiette de crudités / French vegetable plate
So how did it get its name? The word crudités is what the French call a false friend (it looks like an English word but has a different meaning). Like our word crude, it derives from the Latin crudus, meaning raw, even though some of the veggies on a modern assiette de crudités may be cooked.
The vegetable plate pictured above is a winter version, with raw carrots, cooked beets, celeriac remoulade, a boiled egg with a dollop of mayo, and some tender leaves. But the assiette de crudités is a dish for all seasons. One could argue that it’s best in summer when veggie gardens are at their most opulent. But personally I find the plate’s bright colors even more of a joy to behold in the bleak midwinter.
Happy cooking!
When I first tasted risotto al radicchio I was dining alone in Venice and chose it almost at random from a menu with many other dishes that were unknown to me. Bitter red salad with rice? Why not, I thought, figuring it was worth trying something new. How could I have imagined the sublime dish that was brought to my table, rich and subtle, the flavor of the radicchio leaves tamed to a hint of something wild mellowed by creamy rice, butter and parmesan cheese? But there was something more to this dish, something unusual. Intrigued, when I returned to Paris I phoned the chef, who let me in on his secret…
With the end-of-year holidays approaching, this Russian-French version of gravalax makes a fine festive dish. The salmon is marinated overnight in salt and sugar — et voilà, it’s ready. Although I enjoyed this dish many times while working in Russia, where it is known simply as riba salyonnaya, or salted fish, I only started making it in Paris thanks to a Russian friend who passed along her family recipe. Served with shots of vodka or flutes of Champagne, it will get your holiday meals off to a spectacular start.
One of the things I find most amazing about cooking is the way the simplest of ingredients can be turned into a dish that is, frankly, sublime. Red onion tart is such a dish. The onions are gently sautéed with a pinch of thyme, then placed in the tenderest of savory pie shells, sprinkled with cheese, bathed in a mixture of egg, milk and cream, salted, peppered and sprinkled with nutmeg. And all it takes to prepare this creation is one red onion.
