Salad at Oloron St-Marie

"Far from any town or village, lost among the trees on a gentle hill overlooking a man-made reservoir, the restaurant didn't even have a name.  We called it 'the lake place.'  There was no telephone.  If we wanted to make sure of a table we would drive up the previous day to order our meal, but sometimes we would take a chance, arriving at midday and hoping that Giovanna would have some of her freshly made pasta for us." – Elizabeth David, from An Omelette and a Glass of Wine



When we first took bites of this Basque picnic salad, we were sitting, I will never forget, at a specially made backyard terrace overlooking the Orlon-Sainte-Marie in the Basque country of southwestern France.  The name here had no name either, but locals would trickle in as if they already had their seating in place.  A waiter by the name of Igon brought us a Bandol blanc and we sipped at this while

we listened to the water move along the rocky ledges. We asked Igon what his name meant and he said, in English thankfully, 'ascension,' which we thought appropriate by how he produced the food so gracefully. As he laid down our salad plates, he began to describe the salad that was before us with such accuracy that we asked him wryly if this was not maybe a waiter's salad instead.  Igon gleamed and responded to us that he was not merely the waiter

Chef's Salad with Kale and Potato Croutons 

for the evening but also the owner and the chef.  This was simply his home and he opened it up to the public every night except for sunday when, instead, he allowed these same patrons to use his vast kitchen to feed him and his own family.  The Basqaise, as Igon called it, refers to virtually any dish combining local country ham, tomatoes and peppers, which have varying degrees of hot flavor as well as sweetness.  This salad, he pointed out, was not hot but sweet, that it was the potatoes broiled by scallions and parmesan that were the centerpiece, although there was, to be sure, shorn ham, tomatoes grown from down the road, and a roast beef that had been culled from the slow, as he called it, growing Basque cow.  "Underneath, sweet pickles scattered about, but here we like to churn some of our peppers to paste, and there are dabbles here and there."  How could we forget Igon?  To this day, as the refrigerator begins to overfill with lettuces, tomatoes, a few stray red potatoes, I like to create what I now call the Saint-Marie Salad, and can hear the faint trickle of the Oloron in the background.