In the interest of promoting simple food that’s easy to prepare, seasonal, and really, really good … radishes are coming into the market right now full force, and this is a great time to bring them to the table in a way that makes them the star rather than just one more ingredient in a salad.
The radish—along with celery—is one of the more under-appreciated pieces of produce in America. It’s understandable, really—radishes at the supermarket are generally only about color and offer maybe, at most, a modicum of crunch. By contrast, when you eat one of the freshly dug heirloom varietals that are coming in from local farms around here these days … radishes can become a highlight of your eating—one you seek out because they’re so special. They’re alive, crunchy, spicy, sometimes so much so that they start to seriously clear your sinuses the way good Dijon mustard can do. Which makes sense, since they’re botanically in the same family as mustard and turnips. (And while you don’t eat radish seeds, supposedly they’ve got the potential to be made into a good biofuel.) Radishes, as they should be, are something you could happily eat on their own, sort of the way you’d eat little apples or cherries in the fruit world. So you just might want to give up those prepacked, prewashed bags of precut carrot things and eat a bunch of radishes instead.
They’re also amazingly good in the classic French combination of radishes, bread, butter, and sea salt. Because this is such a simple appetizer, you only want to do it with really top-notch ingredients. (A supermarket version wouldn’t be worth the time it took to slice the radishes.) Here’s how: cut some thickish slices of the Bakehouse’s dark-crusted Country Miche (from the large two-kilo loaf), True North, or Farm Bread. Spread the bread with some Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter, always at room temperature. Slice your radishes, lay them onto the buttered bread, sprinkle on a good bit of Portuguese Flor de Sal or French Fleur de Sel, and then eat. That’s all you have to do. It works. And it’s great.
Chef and writer Gabrielle Hamilton, who once worked at the Bakehouse many decades ago, is a devotee:
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. … 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 … 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.
You get the crunch and spice of the radishes, offset by the light, lactic, lively creaminess of the cultured butter and the dark wheatiness of the bread, all enhanced by the sporadic crunchy high notes of the salt crystals. Easy, excellent, exceptionally enjoyable!
