The Bonfire of the Vanities

After the calorie-laden Easter festivities, preceded in my case by a Toronto weekend of colomba, pulla, mämmi and Quebec fudge, a piece of advertising on the wall of one of the huge warehouses along the Riverside Viaduct seems particularly appropriate. In it a bottom packed into tight striped trousers asks, on behalf of a self-storage company: "Does my butt make this room look small?" The same ad has been tucked as a flyer under car windscreen wipers on Riverside Drive. I want lighter fare. I want salad. I also want something that is really tasty.

Proust was transported back to his youth when he dipped a madeleine into a cup of linden tea. Raspberry vinaigrette does the same for me. This yuppie nectar brings back the early 1990s like nothing else. I read somewhere that it was the darling of French nouvelle cuisine and its sunnier Californian cousin in the eighties, and it was still a sign of sophistication in my day. At the time I was scraping by on a tight budget, having just moved into my first apartment, and trying to learn to cook traditional Finnish delicacies. It was a rocky start. Antti never tires of reminding me of my nontraditional take on silakkalaatikko, the Baltic herring and potato bake, in which the herrings swam, backbones intact and unsalted, among semi-raw slices of potato in skim milk.

Pretty quickly I learned that the posher-than-thou back issues of the British House & Garden were much less daunting learning material. Soon I was eating quail eggs in birds' nests of tagliatelle verde for lunch, Moroccan saffron-scented briouats with wild rice biryani and a carrot and orange-flower-water coulis for dinner, profiteroles with mango and praline cream for dessert, and mussels wrapped in balsamic-infused lardons as snacks 😉 No, I am not making those dishes up. While in Helsinki I recovered a whole binder of food-stained clippings straight from the era of power suits, shoulder pads and opaque black tights. Some of the less outrageous dishes are still in my repertoire, although on the whole my taste has moved towards considerably simpler food.

Anyway, here is the dish that triggered all those memories. On my plate the vinaigrette made a thick pink pool, with the asparagus resting among the spinach and the bacon laid across the top.

Raspberry vinaigrette is good on many different salads, and in this one you can easily skip the bacon and the cream. Another wonderful spinach salad has walnuts, a sliced Granny Smith apple and a sliced pear, and perhaps a few slivers of blue cheese. In any case the meal is obviously accompanied by a glass of chardonnay and Tom Wolfe's first novel, the 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities, whose Wall Street bond trader thinks of himself as a Master of the Universe until one wrong turn in the Bronx. To go with the novel, there is this retro New York Times restaurant review.