Damien Pignolet's "Salades" by Ingredient

For someone whose favourite cookbooks include "The River Cottage Meat Book" by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, "Cooking on the Bone" by Jennifer McLagan, and "Nose to Tail Eating" by Fergus Henderson, a book entirely devoted to salads was a challenge. I had thoroughly enjoyed Damien Pignolet's "French", however, and so when he released "Salades" it was time to take up the challenge.

The first challenge was ingredients, and specifically ingredients for the wide variety of vinaigrettes described in the book. My larder had never had any need for pistachio oil, banyuls, mostarda di frutta (mustard fruits, or fruit candied in sugar and honey syrup flavoured with mustard oil) or the esoteric vinaigre de cidre aux algues, échalotes et à la fleur de sel (cider, seaweed, eschalot & fleur de sel vinegar). While Cornwell's cider vinegar was perfectly fine for making Stephanie Alexander's peach chutney, it seemed inadequate as the main ingredient of a delicate vinaigrette.

My first task in meeting the "Salades" challenge, therefore, was the purchase of some top-quality oils, vinegars, mustards and other ingredients that I had not previously had on hand.  Two things occurred during that process that prompted this post: first, I spent hundreds of dollars; secondly, by dint of my poor memory and even poorer record-keeping I ended up with 2 litres of verjuice.  A thought bubble said "I need to find the recipes that use verjuice", and it occurred to me that in place of "verjuice" in that thought bubble one could insert the name of any expensive ingredient of which only small quantities would be used in any particular recipe.

And so I have set out below an index to the recipes in "Salades" by reference to various staple ingredients.

[NB:  Perhaps arbitrarily, I have not included olive oil, peanut oil, grapeseed oil or (non-aged) balsamic vinegar, simply because they have sufficient uses as a staple to not warrant my attention in this list.  Equally arbitrarily, I have included mustards despite the fact that they probably have sufficient uses elsewhere.  I have included under Aged Red and Aged White vinegar those recipes that also call for simply red wine or white wine vinegar, as they seem to me sufficiently interchangeable that you could substitute in the aged variety without difficulty.  I have not included under Aged Balsamic vinegar those recipes calling simply for balsamic vinegar as they seem to me to be sufficiently different as to not be interchangeable.]