COOKING IN: There's a trick to bringing out the vibrant colours of summer salads, writes Hugo Arnold
The tablecloth was white, the plates too, and apart from the silver cutlery and a steel pepper mill almost every other element was white or nearly white. We were assembled under the trees sipping - you guessed it - white wine - before we sat to a lunch which started with a blast of colour. On came plates of salad vivid in their greenness, boldly splashed with reds and blues and yellows and dotted about with black. We were in Sicily, where the sun doesn't shine but sears the sky with an intense vividness that makes you almost heady. This glorious display brought home to me how important colour is in food and how we tend to overlook it.
This is the optimum time of year for salads. All the favourite vegetables are at their best and most vibrant, from densely purple aubergines to bright red and yellow peppers, vivid-green courgettes and luscious beans.
The Americans are particularly good at starting a meal with salads, whereas the French are more inclined to bring them on at the end. We seem to get caught in the middle here sitting as we do between both cultures. But I'm not complaining. Two salads in one sitting seems like the best of two worlds
There is no doubting the visual impact of a table laced with colour. We eat with our eyes first and it is a great way to build up expectation. Vibrant colours do not come from tired vegetables. Sourcing the freshest ingredients is paramount.
At a recent conference, Alice Waters of the famous Chez Panisse in California gave us lunch which started with a bunch of radishes - with leaves still attached which some of us also ate - to nibble on. These came before a salad of three or four different lettuces, some courgettes and slices of a different variety of radish, all dressed with an earthy, grassy olive oil and some lemon juice. Rumour had it that only Waters had been allowed to harvest her ingredients from the garden of Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons in Oxfordshire where the conference was being held, and that she had insisted on doing so scarcely an hour before lunch. No big deal? There were 150 of us eating.
Thinking up recipes is a curious blend of sight, smell, taste and texture, but for me the sight thing is paramount. I have a fondness for white plates and in my mind - and on my kitchen table - it is white china that food gets served on. And if you are wondering what the blue food was that appeared in our Sicilian salad, they were nasturtiums. They give off a peppery kick.