La Vraie Vinaigrette

Place a small clove of chopped garlic into a wooden salad bowl, add a pinch of coarse salt and some freshly ground black pepper, and use the back of a wooden salad spoon to mash them into a coarse paste. To this add dijon mustard (about 1 tsp.) and some red wine vinegar (about 1 tbsp.), mix that around a bit, then pour in some good olive oil (about 4 tbsp.) and stir it all together. Let the vinaigrette sit there, in the bottom of the bowl, until just before dinner, then add the salad greens—some bibb or leaf lettuce or curly endive and maybe a few fresh tarragon leaves. Bring the bowl to the table and toss the salad toward the end of the meal (so un-American!).