House Vin

for the love of salad!

Coming at you live from the upper deck of the Fishers Island Ferry, where I am sitting in unobstructed sunshine. I was hoping for sun this weekend, and, despite yesterday’s gale, I got it. Plus a fat full moon, mating horseshoe crabs, and bracing sea swims.

When going anywhere for a weekend away, but especially to an island, I am concerned about food. There’s very little “oh, I’ll just run out and grab another milk.” We give up convenience for peace, quiet and beauty. As we should. But I am a very hungry person who is easily hangry, so the question, “What will we eat?” haunts me. Without enough forethought and advance procurement, I will not be able to enjoy said peace.

Islands tend to be food deserts. A strange thing since many of them used to be farms (Fishers Island included). You’d think, from an aerial view, an island: what a perfect place to have a circular food system. A sustainable loop. Sadly, no. Islands, all over the world, are deeply unsustainable places in the modern day. Everything must be imported, from food to soil to energy.

I am always amazed looking through Fishers Island history books at how far the island has come from its dairying and farming days. (And equally amazed at how much the 1800s hills, full of rocks and devoid of trees, look like rural Ireland). I do not mean to romanticize the 1800s and I do not mean to romanticize farming, which is really fucking hard. (I just finished reading Yesteryear, and I have no interest in going back in time or becoming a tradwife to a farmer). But I look at all that acreage, all that green, and can’t help but wonder why there is so little being grown today. Why fields are valued for almost everything other than growing food. It makes me sad: how there can be so much wealth in all senses of the word, except wealth in our food and food system.

As Darina Allen says, “I would rather have access to good food than a Prada handbag.”

And to be clear, I have never seen a Prada handbag on Fishers Island.

When I first moved to Fishers, all I wanted was a salad. It was the second thing I put on the menu when I opened the cafe (after egg sandwiches).

I felt so deprived of fresh vegetables, especially coming out of deep island winters. Somehow I fell out of the practice of buying and eating lettuce. It seemed to be the first thing I would forgo on my grocery list. I told myself that the greens were tough to transport and they were the first thing to go bad in my fridge. (I tried growing lettuce myself, year after year, and always gave up pretty quickly… Working chefs seldom have time to be farmers too).

But after many years of feeding myself– of doing it badly and doing it well– I can tell you that salad is extremely important.

Darina Allen would never eat a meal without a salad. Neither would Alice Waters. These matriarchs of good food have salad with every meal, and they honor it. They give their salads prime placement in gorgeous wooden or ceramic bowls on literal pedestals! (If you have never seen a salad stand, it might be time to invest).

Their salad are not complicated– with chops and bits. Their salads are just greens– simple, delicious and leafy. All they need is a drizzle of vinaigrette and flaky sea salt.

The main salad stand at lunch at the Ballymaloe Cookery School– greens cut fresh from the glasshouses that morning… and edible flowers, of course.

Some of the happiest meals of my life have been enjoyed at Ballymaloe with Darina and I think the simple salad has a heck of a lot to do with it. It is never a side or an afterthought. It is an integral part of the meal.

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This weekend on Fishers was relatively impromptu and I traveled up by train with no time to shop. It also meant little time for me to stress about what we were going to eat! I could only bring what was already in my fridge that would fit in an over-the-shoulder cooler bag: a bottle of champagne, a steak, a box of mustard greens, a head of radicchio, hummus, strawberries, a tupperware of leftover chicken and rice, and fresh squeezed orange juice for the train ride.

Luckily, I was staying with a friend, who was arriving by car. She brought the rest– an impressive haul of farm-fresh eggs, veg, jersey milk, prepared foods, a life-saving chicken pot pie, and most importantly: greens!

We ate them for almost every meal. Eggs on greens for breakfast. Big green salads with lunch and dinner.

“Salad,” was the main request from our friend who joined us one evening. He too was missing greens.

He grilled the steak, I made the salad, and our host poured the champagne (all equally important jobs). I whipped up a vinaigrette absentmindedly, but it was the vinaigrette I always end up making.

Our friend came inside from the grill, saw the bowl full of sunshine, and said, “Ah, house vin.” He used to work at the cafe and had made this recipe many, many times since. “I can’t tell you how much house vin I have made in the last year,” he said.

Like special sauce, “house vin” is not a secret! It is a dressing that let me get away with serving such simple salads and having people go crazy for them.

I almost always have a jar in my fridge. It’s an incentive for my salad addiction, which I can so easily forget. I open the fridge, see the jar, and think, “oh my god, yes, salad.”

I will never take greens for granted again.

House Vinaigrette

I like using apple cider vinegar because it has a mild astringency, a natural sweetness, and it’s easy to find a good quality brand without breaking the bank (Bragg’s is great). You can easily substitute with a nice white wine or red wine vinegar, just taste it first and make you like the flavor.

Likewise, use a dijon mustard you enjoy. I am loyal to Maille. But Edmond Fallot, Roland, Beaufour, and Mustard Pommery are all great brands.

YIELD: shy of 1 cup of vinaigrette

INGREDIENTS

1 garlic clove

1 tablespoon honey (runny, not creamed)

1 tablespoon dijon mustard

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar (or a high quality white wine/ red wine vinegar)

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil (the best quality you can find)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. In a wide-mouthed medium bowl, microplane the clove of garlic, tapping or scrape the microplane to get all the delicious bits in the bowl. Add the honey and mustard and whisk to combine. Whisk in the vinegar until incorporated. Then slowly drizzle the oil in while whisking. The oil should emulsify with the other ingredients easily.

2. Use what you need to dress your salad and transfer the rest to a jar to store in the fridge for up to two weeks. When you want to use it, take the dressing out of the fridge a few minutes ahead of time so that the oil warms up. And give it a good shake!

Liquid gold.

Here I am making a very wintery salad– radicchio, parsley, and chopped apples. This does the job when leafy greens are not showing up at the market.

The big green salad was always the hit of any catering event I did. I have never understood the amount of sad salad in the world, especially at big functions. Those sad salads are giving salad a bad name.

Classic lunch on the line. Hastily chopped lettuce, maybe a stray veg (green beans here!), and jammy eggs. Yum.

Throwback to the salads we’d make at the cafe. With greens (and radishes) from White Gate Farm. Edible flowers from Molly Malinowksi.