Wilted Endive Salad

June arrived with hot days and cool nights — the perfect transitional weather, the kind that lets the garden put on real growth and that makes the kitchen comfortable to cook in if you start early and finish before the afternoon. I do most of the substantial cooking in the morning these days from June through August, the heavier work of stews and braises moved earlier, the lighter work of salads and grilled things saved for the late afternoon. The discipline is one I learned in my fifties when the kitchen with the woodstove going in summer became too much for me to face after lunch, and I have kept it up because the rhythm makes sense — the morning person at the morning stove, the afternoon person on the back porch with a book.

The first lettuce came up to a harvestable size this week and I cut my first salad of the year on Wednesday — the loose-leaf lettuce, the little gem heads, a few radishes from the row, a sliced spring onion. The salad was the kind that requires no dressing beyond olive oil and salt and a little vinegar, the lettuce so fresh it had the particular sweetness that lettuce only has in the first week of the season before any heat has hit it. I ate it for lunch four days running and was perfectly content. There are people who think a salad is a side dish. The right salad in the right week is the entire meal.

Lucy came back from Costa Rica Friday — she texted me a photograph from the Burlington airport, the same photograph she sent from Atlanta on the way out, only reversed in direction, and added the caption: home. I texted back: welcome. She drove up Saturday with Sarah, who had picked her up at the airport, and they spent the afternoon at the farmhouse before continuing on to Portland. Lucy was thinner than when she left and her skin was darker from the equatorial sun and her eyes had the particular quality that the eyes of returning travelers have, which is the eyes of someone who has seen a thing that the people around her have not seen and who is in the process of fitting it back into the world she came from. She did not talk much about Costa Rica. She did not need to. She told me one story — about a delivery she had assisted at the clinic, a young mother whose first child had been born without complication, and the way the room had felt afterward — and that one story was enough to tell me what she had learned, which was the thing nurse-midwives have to learn, which is that the work is mostly about being present and quiet and competent at the moments when the world is most fully itself. She has the capacity for it. I had suspected she did. The trip confirmed it.

Made a roasted red pepper soup Saturday for Lucy and Sarah — peppers I had bought at the co-op, roasted and peeled and pureed with sweated onion and garlic and chicken broth, finished with a touch of cream and a swirl of pesto from the freezer batch I made last September. The soup is one of those dishes that look much more complicated than they are, and the result is a smooth bright-orange soup with the smoky depth of the roasted peppers and the richness of the cream, the kind of dish that pleases everyone at a table. We ate it on the porch with bread and butter and a green salad from the garden, and Lucy said it was the best thing she had eaten since leaving the United States, which was a generous overstatement but a kind one. We sat at the table for two hours after the meal. The afternoon went long. Sarah and Lucy left at six. The house went quiet again. I sat with the dog and thought about the granddaughter who has come back from her trip and the granddaughter who will go on her next trip and the long ongoing pattern of grandchildren going and coming, going and coming, in the slow tides of a family's middle decades.

The salad I cut from the garden that Wednesday — loose-leaf and little gem and radishes and spring onion — reminded me why I keep coming back to this wilted endive salad year after year, especially in those first warm weeks when the greens are at their sweetest and the kitchen asks almost nothing of you. It is the same spirit: a little heat, good oil, a splash of vinegar, and the honest character of a leaf that has not been overcomplicated. When Lucy and Sarah arrived Saturday and the afternoon stretched long on the porch, I thought about making it again alongside the soup — because a salad this straightforward is its own kind of welcome home.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 5 minutes | Total Time: 15 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

4 heads Belgian endive, halved lengthwise and sliced crosswise into 1-inch pieces
3 tablespoons good olive oil
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 small shallot, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
1/4 cup toasted walnut halves (optional)

Instructions

Prepare the endive. Halve the endive heads lengthwise, remove any bruised outer leaves, and slice crosswise into roughly 1-inch pieces. Place in a large heatproof serving bowl.
Make the warm dressing. In a small saucepan over medium heat, warm the olive oil. Add the shallot and cook, stirring, for 2 to 3 minutes until softened and just beginning to turn golden at the edges.
Add the acid. Remove the pan from heat and carefully whisk in the red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, and sugar. Season with the 1/4 teaspoon salt and several grinds of black pepper.
Wilt the endive. Pour the warm dressing immediately over the endive in the bowl and toss well. The heat will gently wilt the leaves while leaving them with a little structure — they should soften slightly but not collapse entirely.
Finish and serve. Scatter the chopped parsley over the top and add the toasted walnuts if using. Taste for salt and vinegar and adjust as needed. Serve right away while the salad is still warm.

Nutrition (per serving)

Wilted Endive Salad — The First Salad of the Season, Worth the Whole Meal