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Zydeco salad, a lovely mess. © Ryan Schierling |
I used to think there was no excuse for the unusually sweet, faintly acidic melange of pale green beans, even paler wax beans, and kidney beans that is three-bean salad. It always seemed to be a covered-dish dinner culinary cop out – open a few cans of the stuff, dump contents into Tupperware and stick a spoon in it.
There's a curious item on the menu at B&C Seafood in Vacherie, Louisiana called Zydeco Salad that goes like this – a bed of lettuce, some chopped tomato, olive salad (the kind that goes on a muffaletta sandwich), and three bean salad. After seeing it on a famous-teevee-food-personality's-motorcycle-road-tripping-the-length-of-the-Mississippi-mini-series, I tried to work out the flavor profile in my head, repressing any childhood trauma associated with three-bean salad. The lettuce would be crisp and fresh. The tomatoes would be earthy, acidic and a little sweet. The olive salad would have a complex, rich piquancy. The three bean salad would be a little sweet, a little tart, and have a slight tooth. Somehow, it seemed to work, and the more I considered it, the more I thought that maybe there was a singular, solitary purpose for three-bean salad after all.
This is another one of those charmingly-oddball and acutely-regional Southern dishes that fascinate me so, and as it turns out, it's a great throw-together summer salad. Make your own olive salad the day before or buy a jar of it at the grocer if you've got a favorite brand.