By Leslie Brenner
[Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles about dishes suited to watching and celebrating the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.]
It’s cool, it’s French, it’s healthful, it’s grazeable and it’s a meal on one plate: That’s why the composed salad known as salade niçoise is the ideal offering for Paris Olympics-watching.
Our version of salad niçoise is not the original real-deal: Citizens of Nice, France (from where the salad gets its name) might kick you out of their town for including potatoes and green beans, rather than fava beans and raw artichokes, the OG ingredients.
That’s OK: Dishes evolve, and sometimes it’s for the better. It’s hard to argue that what much of the world, and even France outside of Nice, calls a salad niçoise isn’t terrific. Slices of ripe tomato, cooled cooked potato, hard-boiled eggs, haricots verts, flaked tuna, radishes, anchovies and niçoise olives set on greens and dressed with vinaigrette is a marvelous thing. (The OG version used only olive oil, no vinegar, and didn’t always include tuna!)
How to elevate your evolved salade niçoise game? Use the best jarred or canned tuna (preferably olive-oil-packed) and anchovies you can find, Cook the eggs carefully so their yolks are more jammy than powdery. Use deliciously ripe heirloom tomatoes, and finish the salad with radishes and basil leaves — both of which the OG version often included.
Finally, use real niçoise olives if you can find them — it’s getting harder and harder in my neck of the woods. If you can’t, kalamatas will do.
For Olympics-watching, you might want to put out the salad un-dressed, with a pitcher of vinaigrette on the side, and let everyone drizzle their own. A sliced baguette, maybe a French cheese or two for après-salade, and you’ve got a dinner worthy of a podium finish.
RECIPE: Salade Niçoise
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