Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is about the affinity between salad and madeleines, the various things I have made with fish the last few weeks, a recipe for quick fish soup, and eating notes.
À la minute
Some dishes bind you to the moment more than others; they pull you in and demand that you feel your aliveness very intensely in the present, and also remind you of other times when you have felt so alive. This is the case with salad and madeleines, both of which I ate last week. Though differing in form, flavour, and the point in a meal at which one would typically eat each thing, there is an affinity between salad and madeleines in the manner of their production and appearance at the table: à la minute.
I turn first to the salad. Last Saturday Sam and I had a drink and two small dishes with some bread at the Camberwell Arms before we went to a party (the party with the excellent roasted potatoes-as-finger food mentioned in the previous newsletter). I was feeling strange, overwhelmed and out of my body; grief had hit me that morning for someone important in my life who died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. Then the salad arrived: radicchio and chicory leaves, whole mint leaves, minuscule capers, sweet, pickled shallots, with a veil of finely grated parmesan. It was dressed minimally – mainly olive oil, with the pickled shallots and capers bringing acidity and salt. The salad struck a brilliant balance of bitter, sweet, sharp, and aromatic notes. The mint! The addition of mint in whole leaves was a stroke of genius and was well paired with radicchio and chicory, which can withstand its power. The sweetness of the shallots! The salty punctuation of capers! There is such fleeting magic in a salad – the brief window of freshness, leaves which must be carefully washed, dried, and dressed immediately before serving if they are not to spoil. There are so many ways the balance in a salad can be thrown off that when it works, it is extraordinary; this one brought me back to myself in a sharp rush.
The unexpected combination of ingredients also reminded me of the person I have been thinking about since she died a few weeks ago: I will never forget her folding ripe tomatoes and plenty of chopped green parsley into scrambled eggs when I was about 12, which I had never encountered before.
Like salad, the miraculous quality of madeleines is in the proximity of the moment of their preparation to the moment of eating. On Sunday, to end a lunch made in celebration of spring/summer with asparagus and mayonnaise, lamb shawarma with yogurt sauce, potatoes and ratatouille, our friend Ian produced wine jellies studded with strawberries that were delicate to the point of almost-collapse. The structural precarity of the jellies meant they melted on the tongue, and I was grateful for the cook’s bravely sparing hand with gelatine. Then, just as the jellies were set down, the smell of sweet cake filled the room and he brought round a baking tray of madeleines for us to take with our fingers. I have only eaten madeleines two or three times in my life, but the warmth of them just out of the oven, their the golden inside still damp and soft, makes me really swoon. On this occasion, with the trembling wine jellies, macerated strawberries and cool whipped cream, it is a miracle I did not faint!
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