Has it sprung yet?
After a slow start, spring is here because the swifts are here and they lift my heart. Plus an easy salad that’s full of spring beauty.
I am giddy with spring, even though it’s being the most terrible flirt. One day, we have cascading rain, the next the sun is shining but the wind will flay your skin from your cheeks, the next I’m braving a sandal and going out to meet a friend for ice cream.
Yesterday, I was weeding (the weeds love this constant rain/sun/rain/sun programme) and sitting briefly with my back against the wall, my face tilted upward counting the buds on the magnolia, and I heard them. I heard them before I heard them, if you know what I mean, this happiest of sounds, this herald of true spring, the familiar high scream of the swifts. It registered in my ears before I caught up with myself, with what I was hearing. They’re back. A gang of them circled the air above the house. We’re here. We’re here.
Three years ago, when we were putting the new roof on the house, I got the men to fix two swift boxes to the eaves. Each spring I look up hopefully, as I go to peg out some washing or collect my spade from the shed, to see if they’ve discovered the penthouses I’ve provided for them. Each spring, I’ve been disappointed, but we’ll see. Maybe this will be the year.
It’s challenging to know what to cook when one day it’s Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters and the next it’s his irises. Shall I make a casserole or a salad, is it too late in the year – or too early – for tartiflette, aligot? Was I too hasty putting the raclette away? Does cranking up the salad spinner twice a day constitute aerobic exercise?
The Tuesday market, at least, is fat with spring. There are crates of peas and beans, heaps of asparagus and artichokes, baskets of gariguette and cléry strawberries. Soon there will be melons. Soon, I’ll be complaining it’s 35C and I’ve exhausted myself taking out the bins.
Sorry it’s a terrible clip, but you can hear the swifts even if you can barely see them.
Salade de printemps aux petits pois, asperges et radis
Spring salad with peas, asparagus and radishes
This is a beautiful light and fresh salad and, while I give you weights for each ingredient, it’s most definitely the kind of recipe you can make up as you go along. If you don’t have any broad beans, use more peas, add more cucumber or radishes if you want, throw in more asparagus if what you have is so good you can’t resist it. This is more of a pattern than a recipe. The same goes for the dressing. If you have only parsley, chives and lemon zest, that would be delicious. Add the mint and tarragon if you have them. Chervil would be good too. I slung in some borage – and finished the whole thing off with some pretty blue borage flowers – because it grows like a weed in my garden, but it is definitely not essential.
If you want to make the salad more substantial, you could add some sort of grain or couscous, boiled eggs, some crumbled feta, or flaked, cooked salmon.
Serves 2 as a main course or 4 as a starter
For the dressing
100g fromage frais or Greek yoghurt
Finely grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon, be careful not to remove any of the white pith
1 bunch of parsley, leaves and fine stems only, about 10g, chopped
About 3 tbsp finely chopped chives
About 10 mint leaves, thinly sliced
About 10 tarragon leaves, chopped
A few small, young borage leaves if you have them, thinly sliced, plus some flowers if you have them to finish
For the salad
About 300g thin, green asparagus
About 250g cucumber, half a large cucumber
About 120g radishes
About 120g peas, 300g in their pods
About 100g broad beans, 250g in their pods
A handful of mâché or other small-leaved lettuce, about 50g
2 tsp olive oil
A good squeeze of lemon juice
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper
Make the dressing first to give the flavours time to blend. Stir the herbs and lemon zest in with the fromage frais or yoghurt, then season with salt and pepper.
For this salad, I like to peel the cucumber, halve it lengthways, scoop out the seeds, and then cut it into approximately 1cm slices. I then sprinkle it lightly with salt and leave in a colander to drain for 10 minutes before patting dry with kitchen paper.
Prepare the asparagus. Snap the ends off the asparagus – the point at which it snaps, is the point at which it becomes tender. (Discard the ends or cook then puree them in a soup.) I like to cut the spears into pieces about 10-12 cm long. Pod the peas and beans if you’re using fresh ones.
Wash the radishes very well to remove any dust or grit. Trim off the leaves (if they are spanking fresh, you can mix them, or some of them, in with the salad leaves). Slice the radishes thinly.
Bring a pan of water to the boil and salt it well. Add the asparagus, peas and beans, put on the lid and boil for 1 minute. Drain in a colander and refresh under the cold tap to stop them cooking further. Pat dry with a clean tea towel or with kitchen paper. If you want to (and I always want to, better to enjoy their beautiful pop of emerald green) remove the skins from the broad beans by pressing into the skin with your thumb nail and squeezing between your fingers to pop out the bean.
Tip the radishes, cucumber, asparagus, peas and beans into a bowl and dress with the olive oil and lemon juice. Gently fold in some salad leaves. Season with salt and pepper. Taste the dressing and add more herbs, lemon or salt and pepper if you think it needs it.
Divide the salad between plates and spoon on some of the fromage frais dressing. If you have them, finish with the borage flowers.
Printable Recipe
Market haul April 22 2025
This week’s market haul comprises: sand carrots, a couple of free mangoes, a piece of hard, truffled goat’s cheese, a slab of entre deux Cantal (aged between 3-9 months), cherry tomatoes (I love how the French call these tomates Cocktail – just the thing to go with your martini), the very last of the dekopon mandarins, spring onions, celery, garlic sausage, some slices of ham, a slab of poitrine salée, two pots of fromage frais, radishes, a handful of mâche (lambs lettuce), two packs of ewe’s milk salad or apéro cheese, a French feta-stye cheese made by Gabriel Coulet, who makes Roquefort, yellow peppers, asparagus, parsley, broad beans, peas, pomelo.
I love seeing your market haul, and your ham always looks delicious. I absolutely love 'jambon beurre' on fresh crusty bread.... though the ham here is often on the dry side 😮. The Italians just don't seem to consume it in the same quantities.... and though it looks juicy, for some reason it isn't.
I was all poised to create a salad very similar to yours, but after a glorious day yesterday, we're on rain and wind today, I'm thinking more of soup now. 😮 Have a lovely weekend.....
Hello, are you me? Though in fact I’m probably you - de-burping the cucumber, essential!; the (compulsive) podding of the broad beans and the snapping of the asparagus stalks which I learnt only a few years ago from a dear school friend with whom I reconnected properly, unexpectedly. She had always been forthright and that hadn't changed. “Did your mother never teach you to snap the stalks???” Nope, because I doubt my mother had ever had fresh-from-the-garden asparagus until we lived in a house with asparagus in the garden, though she’d lived in Germany and had plenty of spargel, so she cut the home-grown with a knife, and kept cutting until she felt no resistance. Every time I snap my asparagus I think of my friend, who died very suddenly at fifty of cancer.
Sorry, that took a sadder turn than expected, and I meant that asparagus snapping reminds me happily of Sophy (to my Sophie) and her huge heart and blunt manner and that I miss her often. And that’s a great-sounding salad that she would have loved.