The Wonder of Three Ingredients

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/magazine/the-wonder-of-three-ingredients.html

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Radishes with sweet butter and coarse kosher salt is so early, so seminal a food memory that I cannot remember my first. My father grew radishes in our garden behind our childhood home; he grew them throughout his series of post-divorce bachelor rentals, in narrow wooden containers he built himself; he grew them still in raised beds on the deck of his apartment even after it had to be fitted with a funicular chair to manage the stairs and a safety handrail to manage the shower. I would be surprised if he missed a spring radish planting in 40 years.

In 1999, I put this dish on my opening menu at Prune, and we have been serving it every day of every week of every month for the past 17 years. Each day I go in to the walk-in refrigerator and see the clean container of the day’s radishes, washed and packed away in damp cotton dinner napkins by the porter, and I grab a couple to eat out of hand. Which is to say, there has never been life without radishes, butter and salt.

It’s a staple in France — neither exotic nor particularly haute — that resonates here as an intriguing and curious and somehow sophisticated combination for those who have never encountered it before. The peppery, fiery radishes are tamed by the swipe through the cool, creamy butter, and then the flavors of both are brought out by the salt. The radishes are so cold and crunchy and spicy, and they have a mildly sulfuric note. The butter is unexpectedly sweet in contrast. It’s addictive.

With only three ingredients, there is nowhere to hide. You want clean, fresh, firm, small radishes with lively looking, robust leafy green tops (which are very good in salads). The yellowing cello-packed radishes, sweating in their own condensation, are out of the question here. In fact, I am rarely preachy about this kind of thing, and I love a grocery store much more than I like a farmers’ market, but I think they are out of the question anywhere. They’re gross.

A good high-fat-content butter on the side in a neatly cut tablet, tempered to waxy and cool, and a small dish or pile of coarse kosher salt on the same plate. That’s the classic.

Many people ask how to eat it. I think you should just go at it and see what’s right for you. It’s a lot like having your first salt rim on a margarita: Startled at first, you figure it out quickly! Some people swipe and dip into the salt, others swipe and sprinkle. The radishes need to be moist but drained so well that they have traction when dragged through the butter. If they are too wet, they slip right over the butter, and it won’t cling. And the butter has to be left out of the refrigerator long enough to become spreadable, but not warm or greasy — if it’s as soft as mayonnaise, it’s too warm. The only thing I’ll say about the salt is that it has to be a salt you actually enjoy chewing.

By now you might know some of the characteristics that distinguish chefs from home cooks — our shockingly liberal use of fat, our superior equipment, our crews of helpers who do all the prep and all the dishes — but the one thing I see that consistently separates the chef from the home cook is that we taste everything, all the time, before we commit it to the dish, right down to the grains of salt. We slurp shot glasses of olive oil and aerate them in our mouths as if it were a wine we were trying to know. We taste the lamb, the fish, the butter, the milk before we use it. Before it’s too late. And we chew salt to see how we like it in our teeth, on our tongues, and to know its flavor, its salinity. So taste your salt and your butter, and decide what you like.

There have been several instances over the years when, spooked by questions of my own validity and relevance in my industry — Is this it? Radishes with butter and salt and they call me “Chef”? — I felt I should do more and be more and fuss more. So I’ve messed around with the salt and the butter and the radish too. I’ve piped cultured goat butter using a No. 27 closed star tip in a pastry bag into perfect tiny chrysanthemums. I’ve sourced exquisite knuckle-length French-breakfast radishes split in half lengthwise and set them out like canoes. I’ve garnished with amber flakes of smoked Maldon salt. Over a low flame, I’ve whisked the butter with simmering water into a white and milky beurre fondue and triple-dipped the whole radishes, then set them to cool on sheets of acetate — like strawberries dipped in white chocolate. At my most elaborate, I’ve made radish “threads,” hand-cut with the sharpest of knives. Replaced the salt with an impeccable salmon roe from the Yarra Valley, where they put natural clove oil in the tanks and palpate the gravid fish to encourage them to jettison their roe sacs. Instead of cool, waxy butter, I’ve spooned a sweet pool of warm and nutty browned butter around the plate. In each instance, though, I didn’t like what it did to the spirit and the statement of the original.

I decided to stay put and keep the home fires burning around here. The revelation and sophistication of the dish as is — clean radishes, good butter, good salt on the plate and nothing else — is (like everything the French do) about the understatement. The restraint. What you don’t do to it.

Staying faithful to a dish for 17 years — through the epoch of the nose-to-tail, and the era of the siphon, and the fad of edible dirt, the trends of carrot-top pesto, smoked yogurt, unripened green blueberries and strawberries, vegetable “butchers,” orange wine, the house-made, the fermented and the charred, the raw, the induction burner, the dehydrator, the pop-up-run-out-of-the-back-of-a-cellphone-store, the denim aprons and the sideburns — can feel like a commitment to a marriage. Happily, it’s one in which I find myself steadfastly loving, with both deep affection and bright ardor, this dish the way it is. If I ever took it off the menu, and found myself in the walk-in with an empty spot on that shelf where the container had always been, I would feel like a widow. If Prune makes it to 40 years, I would be surprised if I’m not still making this plate, this way.

Recipe: Radishes With Sweet Butter and Kosher Salt