Radicchio, Mushroom, Prosciutto, Comté & Black Truffle Salad

a Salade Composée for the truffle season

There seems to be some disagreement as to what comprises a salade composée (literally, composed salad). Some seem to think this is a salad in which the ingredients are arranged separately on a plate, not tossed together, then drizzled with a dressing. For some a salade composée can even mean a selection of different appetisers on the same plate: a misguided Frenchified version of the Italian antipasti misti. This misbelief seems to have given birth to all manner of atrocious salad bar creations. For example, off the top of my head (please forgive me), a few cubes of leftover beef from a stew, some grated carrots, (cold) fried mushrooms, cold kidney beans, boiled potatoes, sweetcorn, mixed salad leaves and a bit of raw onion. Even the finest of vinaigrettes would not save this abomination.

In France a salade composée at its most basic means simply a salade mixte - ie not a single ingredient salad (eg lettuces with a vinaigrette), but a salad with a few different ingredients that involves some element of composition. Anyone who has eaten in a provincial French restaurant will recognise the section of the menu labelled LES SALADES: this is invariably a selection of hefty salads to be eaten as a main course, usually laden with meats, hams or cheeses, or indeed a combination of all three, and often, but not always, including some starchy element.

You might recognise such classics as salade niçoise (usually including boiled potatoes and green beans - heresy!), salade lyonnaise (frisée, lardons & poached egg), salade landaise (a few salad leaves, foie gras, smoked cured duck breast, sometimes also some ham), salade de chevre chaud (with croutons topped with rounds of goat’s cheese, grilled and drizzled with honey), salade alsacienne (aka Würstsalat; with smoked cervelas sausage, emmental and cornichons) and so on and so forth. Theses composed salads are joined on the international stage by the famous Ceasar, Waldorf and so on. Anyway, I put it to you that there is nothing in theory wrong with a hefty salad, but I ask that some consideration be put into what goes into it.

Richard Olney, in inimitable style, waxes lyrical about salade composée in ‘Simple French Food’. For Olney, a salade composée is the highlight of the salad season, an ever-shifting, improvised composition highlighting all the best his kitchen garden has to offer: “nothing in the entire repertory of food possesses the same startling, vibrant visual immediacy—the same fresh and casual beauty. It is a concentrated, pulsating landscape of garden essences and must absolutely be tossed at table, for, no matter how delicious, the visual explosion of joy, mixing intricately and lastingly with your guests’ memories of mingled flavors, adds a dimension.”

I won’t claim to be quite as nuanced as Mr. Olney on this subject, but it was through re-reading his lovely 1200 words on the composition of salads that I came to the following recipe. Really this recipe came about because we got some lovely pink radicchio into the restaurant: it was January, and time to cook something a little lighter, and the radicchio happened to sit on the counter next to some parma ham that I had just sliced, the shapes and colours begging to be put together. The real fun of this salad is not knowing where pink leaf ends and ham begins.

As much as this salad requires a few recherché ingredients, there is nothing difficult here at all; rather just a care in assembly. The mushrooms, as they will be sliced raw, should be squeaky fresh and firm, the comté (a well-aged example, naturally) shaved finely with a vegetable peeler or your truffle slicer, the perky leaves carefully washed and dried, and the vinaigrette nicely balanced with mustard, vinegar, oil and just a lick of cream to round things out a bit. If you can get your hands on a real winter black truffle then I urge you to save some to make this. Use as much as you like (and can afford, of course); this salad is delicious with either just a few slices or a generous showering of the black stuff. When I had my restaurant Sardine we served this salad often during truffle season. It’s nice to be able to write about something that we did at Sardine. The Black Truffle Dinner pictured below was our last “Grande Bouffe” dinner before Covid came along in March 2020, and a jolly nice one it was too, though I say so myself. We closed the restaurant two weeks later and never re-opened the doors. What a ride! See below for the recipe. Hopefully some more Sardine favourites soon…

Our last ever Grande Bouffe dinner

Radicchio, Mushroom, Prosciutto, Comté & Black Truffle Salad

Serves 4