The way each of us meets summer is often wrapped in nostalgia. No matter what our age, we anticipate it as we did in childhood, as if we can play our way through its long days in carefree, barefoot abandon, refreshed from the heat by endless wedges of cold watermelon and dripping cones of ice cream. It's a bit odd, then, that for most of my adult life, I've welcomed summer by making something I never had in my childhood: a classic French salade niçoise.
In a convoluted way it does go back: As a boy I loved canned tuna and olives, and this is both—with a French accent, no less. But that's a real stretch.
After all these years of making it, like most who love it, I've of course developed some very definite ideas about what belongs in a good salade niçoise—and doesn't. But Read More