AGING HOUSE VINAIGRETTE

 

I was typing a poem entitled Typing V on my manual Smith-Corona when this recipe announced itself in my head, not necessarily disrupting creative flow, but perhaps extenuating it (the first verse in the poem had foraged Chinese violets pictured on the ground, and they were edible). Vinaigrette should be a staple condiment/sauce enhancer in your home ready to use, especially to dress your salad lunch or dinner, and it ages well blended in at once while fresh; though oil and vinegar separate and ferment alone, they will osmose your live herbs bottle-wide, like oak to bloom in wine (in my house vinaigrette I used flowers of shallots, marigolds I grow and wild micro-tomatoes from the nearby sea wetlands bog). Perhaps Patience Gray, one of my beloved literary food writer heroes, whispered this recipe in my head because the poem I was writing was unwittingly about her, too, with Gary Snyder, a modern day Basho, in New Mexico. For sweetness, lacking sugar in my cupboard, I used the tea granule powders of cinnamon, cardamom, clove and chicory root from the bag branded Yogi, a soothing caramel bedtime herbal supplement. It should work. And for a lineage of heat, red pepper flakes and their seeds in the bottle. In Buenos Aires years ago when I had studied with Chef Manuel Posse, my classmates from Germany, France and Japan organized a parilla (barbecue camp) and I was in charge of, you guessed it, the salad to go well with all the butchered meat to grill, and while I was at it made also vegetables of halved onions and green zucchini skewers. The dressing I did used local wine vinegar from Mendoza, the oil a mix of grape seed and olive, copiously together, and key to elevate the emulsion glacé is sugar and salt in perfect balance, but in harmonious zest to the blood sausages drip in gif sage and short ribs rubbed down smoky of Spanish paprika and garlic chimichurri. Rolf was delighted with my dressing and said it reminded him of his grandmother’s recipe in Köln. I was watching an old Martha Stewart cooking episode last night, an event she hosted at her sprawling and elegant estate ranch in Bedford, MA (the grounds were so beautiful from a bird’s eye like the castle at Versailles) celebrating a silver anniversary of her Living magazine with her editorial and creative team and their spouses as guests, and she did all the cooking for her staff - the boss giving back to her loyal employees, through an All-American aristocratic banquet feast to the eyes. The long table outside her largest greenhouse was draped in taupe linen cloth and decorated with bouquets of mixed herbs and succulents, very Martha design, keen to detailed beauty, across the line. Her salad was princessly simple and aesthete: in fresh-cut radicchio leaf made into bowls, she put her chopped corn salad tomato verde greens dressed only in oil, rice vinegar and sugar. And the rest is history.