French radishes with cultured butter and fleur de sel: the opening note of the classic bistro lunch
Origin: Paris & Île-de-France, France
From the journey of Radish.
Radis au beurre is one of the most demanding preparations in French cooking. It demands only three ingredients, the radish, the butter, and the salt, and asks that all three be of a quality that most cooking can afford to obscure. There is nowhere to hide. The French Breakfast radish (radis de petit-déjeuner) was developed in the market gardens outside Paris during the eighteenth century, when the maraîchage tradition, intensive cultivation under glass cloches and hot frames, made it possible to force spring vegetables in the depths of winter. Market gardeners in Montrouge and Gentilly could deliver tender, pale-tipped French Breakfast radishes to the stalls of Les Halles by February, weeks before any other fresh vegetable arrived from the fields. The variety is milder and slightly sweeter than small round red radishes, with a crispness that holds for longer after harvest, making it ideal for the restaurants and brasseries of the Second Empire and Third Republic that established radis au beurre as a canonical first course. The butter must be cultured (fermented, with a tang produced by the lactic bacteria that slow-cured milk develops into something more complex than fresh cream) and must be French, or at minimum made in the French tradition. The salt must be fleur de sel: the hand-harvested sea salt crystals from Guérande or the Île de Ré, which dissolve against the tongue at a different rate than refined salt, leaving a clean marine sweetness rather than a flat mineral sting. The preparation requires no technique. What it requires is restraint: the willingness to let three things of extraordinary quality speak without improvement.
This preparation exists only at the level of its ingredients. Échiré butter, produced by a single dairy cooperative in the Deux-Sèvres, is considered by many French chefs to be the finest butter in the world; cultured, lightly salted, with a complex tangy depth. Bordier, from Brittany, is similarly extraordinary. Any good cultured European-style butter (Plugrá, President, or similar) is a workable substitute; supermarket uncultured butter is not. Fleur de sel cannot be replaced with regular table salt or even coarse sea salt: the crystal structure, the marine character, and the way it dissolves are specific and essential. Radis au beurre is classically served with the aperitif, a glass of Muscadet, Chablis, or a dry rosé, before the first course of a bistro lunch. In the Parisian tradition, it is placed on the table as the bread arrives, eaten with no particular ceremony while the menu is considered.
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