WHAT TO DO when your hosts give you salad at the beginning of dinner? Leave immediately. The same with soup.
I mean, of course, either green salad or those dreadful hotchpotch salads with tomato, lettuce, bean sprouts, alfalfa, kidney beans, sweet corn (considered cattle food in France), and a thousand and one other things, all dripping in any dressing except olive oil and wine vinegar, topped with packet pseudo-croutons and served in children’s bowls. And by “soup” I mean minestrone, tomato, or those weird whitish ones which taste the same when they are supposed to be chicken as when they are called clam chowder. I do not mean bouillabaisse or zarzuela, which aren’t soups in the same sense at all, or first courses using “salad” ingredients: tonno e fagioli with raw purple onions; anchovies, basil, and tomato; or even authentic “composed” dishes such as salade Niçoise with tomatoes, grated carrot, eggs, tuna, anchovies, potatoes, and olives.
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