Grand Army Plaza, Salad Nicoise and Salvias

"It's a hot one!"

Lately, this is the mantra with which R. greets the morning, emerging from the bedroom with a stretch and a wry smile, delighted to be the bearer of such news.

Saturday was no exception. And still, stupidly, I waited until past 11 to head to the market. We sat to breakfast — Americanos and toasted cornbread with over-easy eggs, tomatoes, and basil from the flowerpots beside the window — discussed for too long the movie we'd watched the night before, and then I'd flipped through "The Kitchen Diaries" by Nigel Slater, looking for a particular hot-weather pastry crust and then reading aloud, to a mostly listening R., Slater's entry for August 1:

There has been a cantaloupe melon in the larder for five days now. Each morning I give it a turn and a sniff, rolling it over and over in my hands. This morning it is as ripe as anyone could wish for. Heavy with juice, it has a dent in one side and won't last another day. There are four of us for lunch, so I pick up some prosciutto to go with the melon. The two ingredients remain my first choice with which to start a summer meal. . . .

After a bottle of Pinot Grigio (slightly too cold, someone whispers) and some thin slices of fennel-seed bespeckled salami, one of my guests suggests it is too hot to eat in the sun, so we drag the garden table under the robinia tree. This sends dapples of light over the table, making it look more beautiful than it really is (it is just a piece of wood rescued from a skip), and the meal look cool and romantic.

I left with the image of his shade-dappled table, but arrived at a hot market with a high sun and black pavement and so hurried through the shopping, quickly uncomfortable and wondering if the sweat trickling between my shoulder blades was visible through my dress.

We'd invited the neighbors for Sunday dinner and R. had promised "something nicoisey," so I shopped with this agenda, cutting out my usual meandering. Lettuces, string beans, red potatoes, red onions. A focaccia for us to have for lunch, with some of the greens; zucchini, to get us through a meal later in the week, and to roast and put into a frittata to serve with the salad. Plus, a big, fragrant cantaloupe* I was helpless to resist. Like Slater, I intended to serve it as a first course with prosciutto.













































I'd already bought green beans and yellow wax bean when, buying Ruby Streaks and other herby greens to toss with the lettuces, I discovered purple ones, which would have been fun. Though according to the sign taped to their bin, they turn green when you cook them. (Even a quick blanching, do you think?)

No milk, no cheese, no fish — too hot! Though before leaving I stopped at the Lebak Farm stand (from Chesterfield, N.J.) for flowers for the table and left with a bouquet of Salvia, wondering whether it was their name or purple flowers that seemed so cooling. Salvia. Salve. Balm. A balm against the heat.
















* Someone recently asked me the trick to picking a perfect melon, which I've wondered about myself. To decent results, my method has been to press the belly button ends of the melon for a little give, and also to sniff at these spots to make sure they smell juicy.

The other night I was reading a beautiful new cookbook, "Menu del Dia: More than 100 Classic, Authentic Recipes from Across Spain" by Rohan Daft (gracias, Miguel y Silvia!), and it offered this advice: "Test the freshness of melons and pineapples by holding the top in the palm of one hand and the bottom in the palm of the other and pressing gently; the tops and bottoms are always the first parts of these fruits to show signs of deterioration."

If by deterioration Daft means ripeness, then I'm with him. The other assumption is that in Spain, pineapples must be sold relieved of their spiky tops...