[Petit Salé aux Lentilles]

If you had told twelve-year-old me that a Sunday morning, fifteen years later, would find me cooking this dish, I would have laughed so hard I might have choked on my petit suisse.

Petit salé aux lentilles is a splendid specialty from Auvergne in which cured pork is slowly cooked and served with lentils. The “splendid” part was hard for us kids to grasp when presented with the school cafeteria‘s take on it: sickly purple straps of oversalted leather sitting on a muddy brown mush. The sight and smell were disheartening enough that, on petit salé days, we largely subsisted on bread.

But now that I am older and wiser, now that I have a kitchen to call my own, now that I’ve been introduced to green lentils from the Puy and the Berry (the upper crust of the lentil society, delicately flavored and not a bit mealy), and now that I have access to a good organic butcher, my heart and stomach feel differently.

This epiphany wasn’t planned: I was simply waiting in line at the butcher’s market stand when I noticed an unfamiliar cut of meat in a dish at the far end of the counter (always be on the lookout for what the butcher keeps on the side). I couldn’t read what was scribbled on the label, so when my turn came, I pointed and asked hesitantly, “What does this say… magret de porc?” This, apparently, is very funny*; try it on your butcher sometime. No, what the label said was jarret de porc (pork shank) and he was out of it anyway, but what he did have was palette demi-sel**. “Great for choucroute or petit salé,” he said.

I had just bought carrots and shallots and I knew there was a package of lentils in my pantry somewhere, so petit salé was a done deal, and after getting a tip or two from my grandmother and assorted websites, up it went on the menu for Sunday lunch.

Fork-tender meat, softened vegetables, and pop-in-your-mouth lentils: this is a rustic and invigorating dish, of which you don’t need extraordinary quantities to feel the warm glow of satisfaction, and which constitutes the ideal dietary intake if you plan on going for a run and locking yourself out later in the afternoon.

* Magret is the breast of a fatted duck or goose. Since porks don’t fly (except for these piglets from Les Aldudes), there is no such cut on a pork.

** Palette is the cut of meat that’s wrapped around the shoulder blade of the pork. Demi-sel means it’s cured in salt: it should be soaked before use to remove most of the saltiness, and there is no need to add salt to the dish you use it in.

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Cha Soba, Concombre et Tofu

So verdant is this dish that it could have been my contribution to Saint Patrick’s Day. But because the French don’t really celebrate it (unless they happen to find themselves at one of the Irish pubs on boulevard de Clichy) and because my father’s name is Patrick, March 17th is simply that: my father’s fête. He usually receives a gift of pâtes de fruits, we get to help him gobble them up before they have time to hit the ground, and that’s that. No color theme.

So this is not what this dish is about. This dish is about going to dinner on rue Sainte-Anne — Paris’ pocket-sized Japantown — and noticing as you exit the noodle joint that the Juji Ya convenience store is still open. It is about stepping in, walking past the take-out counter and up the steps towards the back of the shop to buy mugicha (barley tea), azuki beans, cha soba (buckwheat noodles flavored with green tea powder), and a block of firm tofu — and throwing in a couple of the mochi rice cakes that blink up at you at the register, to share on the walk home.

It is about thanking your lucky stars when you realize, the next day, that a cucumber has recently taken up quarters in the fridge (yes, you bought it yourself, but sometimes you forget about those things), and that if it joins forces with the tofu, the soba noodles, and a few pantry ingredients, you have the makings of a fine dish of cold soba, possibly the most refreshing, replenishing lunch imaginable.

And finally, it is about setting your chopsticks in twitching motion, slurping up the slippery strands (making sure you do not cut them with your teeth, ever), munching on the crunchy cukes, and exclaiming, because you’ve started learning a little Japanese and would never miss an opportunity to practice, “Oishii desu yo!”*

Juji Ya / map it!
46 rue Sainte-Anne, 75002 Paris
01 42 86 02 22

* “Delicious!”

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When I was in New York City a few weeks ago, my flight landed in early afternoon on a Saturday. By the time the cab dropped me off on the sidewalk of my hotel it was mid-afternoon, and clean sheets and a plump pillow were a tempting proposition, but I resisted. The only anti-jetlag strategy that has ever worked for me is to fight sleepiness and stay active until the local clocks give me permission to pass out.

When I tasted a small spoonful of the wax structure, it shattered on my tongue in a most pleasing way.

In this case I had quite a few hours to fill, as I had a late dinner date with a friend. So I kept myself busy, ate a bagel sandwich (is there a way to eat those things without having all of their innards spill out onto your lap?), tried to survive hypothermia long enough to decide which apples looked best at the Union Square greenmarket, met a friend for coffee (make that a double!), bought a pair of jeans, and spent the rest of the time browsing the aisles of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

I found the chocolate I’d been meaning to sample, and from the depths of the sweetener section, a box of honeycomb from Georgia.

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As the weather in Paris becomes increasingly springlike — hello daffodils! come sit by me on the kitchen counter! — I thought it was high time I illustrate the point I recently made about salads and the ones that carry us through to the end of winter (however mild ours has been).

The original motive for this one was to try and vanquish my dislike of endives, one of the very last bastions of my childhood aversions. It is going to require more work before I clap my hands at the thought of endives au jambon — even my mother’s — but at least this salad has flown me over the raw endive hurdle.

It’s a simple trick to play on one’s senses, really: if the taste buds recoil in the face of bitterness, they may tolerate it when balanced with sweeter, more consensual flavors. And given time and multiple exposures, they may even grow to enjoy that grown-up, mixed-signal pleasure. It is a strategy well-known to pharmaceutical companies, though one might wish they used beets and parmesan more often than the revolting artificial strawberry.

And this is how this salad works: you carve out the hearts of small endives — therein lies most of their bitterness, if only you knew what they’ve been through — and toss them with roasted beets and mâche, a fleshy winter salad for which baby spinach could be substituted.

The colorful trio receives a sprinkle of parmesan and toasted seeds — I keep a jar of pumpkin, sunflower, and sesame seeds for such purposes — before it is dressed in olive oil paired with a tangy-sweet agent: balsamic vinegar, pomegranate molasses, this rejoicing staple of the Lebanese pantry, or oxymel, a versatile syrup of honey, vinegar, spices, and fruits with which I’ve recently been playing to lovely results.

The product of these simple steps is a good sidekick to a juicy chicken thigh or a grilled sole, and it makes a fine lunch in its own right when topped with diced ham or a poached egg. The recipe is — need I stress it? — open to endless variations in terms of dressing and accessories: I like the addition of green peppercorns, crushed, or a few cloves from a head of fresh garlic, finely minced.

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