You can make a niçoise salad year-round, and I do: I always have canned tuna in the pantry and olives and anchovies in the fridge, and the grocer closest to me stocks cherry tomatoes and green beans even in the depths of January. It’s not eating with the seasons, but it is eating with my instincts, and when I want punch and tang and heft — with good-for-me greens — it’s the only salad that’ll do.
But a summer niçoise? That’s the nicest niçoise, especially in these early days of the season when boiling potatoes and eggs doesn’t feel masochistic. Now is when those green beans and tomatoes start to show off, the egg yolks mirror the sun’s assertive shine and the tuna tastes somehow even better and meatier. Melissa Clark’s gorgeous recipe ups the summeriness with a puckery lemon-anchovy vinaigrette and handfuls of basil. It’s not the only salad in our Summer 100, but I’d argue that it’s the salad of our Summer 100.
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Niçoise Salad With Basil and Anchovy-Lemon Vinaigrette
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You’ve seen our Summer 100, right? It’s our list of 100 recipes to cook (or, in the case of abdoogh khiar and others, not cook) now until whenever pumpkins start to appear. I’m starting with the grilling recipes, particularly Ali Slagle’s chicken with tomatoes and corn, which rests the fresh-off-the-grill chicken on the veggies to turn those drippings into a warm, savory vinaigrette. And I can’t resist harissa anything, so Yossy Arefi’s grilled harissa shrimp is next on the list, with plenty of flatbread for gripping the shrimp as I slide them off the skewers.
The peaches haven’t quite popped where I live, so I’ll make Hana Asbrink’s cold tofu salad with tomatoes and peaches with just tomatoes for now. (The tomatoes aren’t yet at their sweet peak either, but the salty-sour, umami-rich dressing more than makes up for that.) I also appreciate the flexibility of this marinated feta with herbs and peppercorns from Alexa Weibel. It can be stirred into pasta, smooshed onto bread, tumbled over seared fish or roasted vegetables or, as one reader notes, folded into the morning’s scrambled eggs.
Summer’s long, lingering evenings call for dessert, and Jessie Sheehan’s four-ingredient Nutella brownies are just the sort of thing to throw together to eat under a late-setting sun. A little more work — but extremely worth it — are these mango and sticky rice Popsicles from Samantha Seneviratne. But as she notes, you could skip making the sticky rice and instead pick up a side order from your local Thai restaurant, putting you one step closer to cold, fruity, delightfully chewy summer satisfaction.
