Three salads

Eastside Road, July 7, 2011—

WE BEGAN THE DINNER with the last of that delicious egg-and-potato salad. I asked Lindsey yesterday where the recipe was: there isn't any; it's simply in her head. (It reminded me of an evening years ago in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when we had eaten in what seemed to me a wonderful Italian restaurant, so good that I poked my head into the kitchen to thank the chef. She was an old Italian lady. When I asked her where the recipes came from, she grinned and tapped her temple with a crooked index finger.)

After the egg-potato salad — I can't bring myself to call it simply potato salad — we had a fine dish of Corona beans, cooked, cooled, tossed with oil and chopped onion, and flavored with fresh marjoram from the garden. I like a leaf of sage on beans like this, but marjoram is a more spring-like sort of flavor, combining beautifully with the olive oil, and somehow lending a silky quality to the chestnutty texture of the beans.

Green salad afterward, of course.

Nero d'Avola, Epicuro (Sicilia), 2009