Jacques Pépin's Childhood Potato Salad Is Still One Of His Favorite Meals

In the kitchen, even the pros like to keep it simple sometimes — especially where nostalgia is involved. It's like that iconic scene from Disney-Pixar's 2007 masterpiece "Ratatouille," when esteemed French food critic Anton Ego is transported back to his childhood at the taste of ratatouille, a peasant dish he grew up eating. For chef and Chevalier de L'Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur Jacques Pépin, that dish is a rustic French potato salad.

In a YouTube short posted by KQED, Pépin shares the story behind a favorite recipe from his childhood: grenaille potatoes in a curly endive salad with garlic dressing. "The recipes that you have as a child are very powerful, they are very visceral. They stay with you, too. I remember many recipes, but certainly one of them, when my mother used to go to the garden just before we ate, and unearthed those tiny potatoes we called grenaille in France, which are like a fingerling potato." From there, says Pépin, his mother would saute those fingerling potatoes, then toss them together with curly endive and a garlic dressing. He notes, "This is still one of my favorite meals."

Grenaille potatoes are customarily less than 1 ½ inches long. Thanks to their size, these small-but-mighty beauties are prized for their unique texture, quickly crisping up on the outside while remaining pillowy and plush on the inside. To prepare these buttery and nutty flavored spuds, you can also parboil and roast them in olive oil, salt, and pepper,  or add thyme and rosemary to the mix for a more complex salad. 

If you haven't worked with it before, endive is a leafy green European-native vegetable from the chicory family. When served raw, it provides a robust, peppery, and bitter crunch to cold salads. Plus, the crisp and frilly leaves of curly endive create a unique textural mouthfeel, zhuzhing up the simple, rustic potatoes. But you also can experiment with other leafy greens and add-ins.

Pépin is all about cooking with fresh vegetables. In an exclusive interview with Tasting Table, the chef tells us that he's a vocal proponent of centering dishes around whatever produce happens to be in season. For primo seasonal cooking, different elements of this salad shine during different parts of the year: Endive is in season from late summer to early fall, and garlic scapes (for the dressing) are in season from late spring through early summer. Or, for a bold garlicky dressing in a pinch, we're loving Newman's Own Parmesan & Roasted Garlic salad dressing.

Pépin's beloved childhood potato salad would make a fabulously savory-yet-light side dish to heavier traditional French dishes, such as beef bourguignon or coq au vin. It could also serve as a standalone meal for a light lunch, paired with a protein and some crusty bread, butter, and a glass of chilled white wine. To help home cooks out, we've rounded up a few tips for nailing the absolute best batch of potato salad every time.