Mesclun (or Ensalado Champanello)

A Salad That's a Mix of What?

JACQUES MÉDECIN CLAIMED mesclun definitively for Nice. It’s recipe no. 182 in his Cuisine du Comté de Nice, a tall, narrow, red-highlighted book of 308 Niçois recipes. It appeared in 1972, and if you want a Nice cookbook, it’s the one to have. Médecin, who was mayor, seems to have loved the city’s food. (He held office from 1966 until 1990, when he fled to Uruguay to escape corruption charges. He was eventually extradited and served almost two years in prison. Peter Graham, who wrote the evocative Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village, translated Médecin’s book into English. He met Médecin and later painted an appalling picture of him. The cookbook may be Médecin’s best legacy.) “If I wanted to write a book about the cuisine of the Comté de Nice,” Médecin said, “that is because it seemed to me that my generation was the last repository of ancestral traditions.” The recipes came partly from his grandmother, who in the 1880s recorded them as they were dictated by Tanta Mietta; her photograph is the frontispiece of the book. Those recipes, Médecin said, were already 100 years old. Yet for all that, the book appears to have been secretly written by the starred chef Jacques Maximin, who was Médecin’s friend at the time.