The Wonder of Three Ingredients (Published 2017) (2024)

Radishes with sweet butter and coarse kosher salt is so early, so seminal a food memory that I cannot remember my first. My father grew radishes in our garden behind our childhood home; he grew them throughout his series of post-divorce bachelor rentals, in narrow wooden containers he built himself; he grew them still in raised beds on the deck of his apartment even after it had to be fitted with a funicular chair to manage the stairs and a safety handrail to manage the shower. I would be surprised if he missed a spring radish planting in 40 years.

In 1999, I put this dish on my opening menu at Prune, and we have been serving it every day of every week of every month for the past 17 years. Each day I go in to the walk-in refrigerator and see the clean container of the day’s radishes, washed and packed away in damp cotton dinner napkins by the porter, and I grab a couple to eat out of hand. Which is to say, there has never been life without radishes, butter and salt.

It’s a staple in France — neither exotic nor particularly haute — that resonates here as an intriguing and curious and somehow sophisticated combination for those who have never encountered it before. The peppery, fiery radishes are tamed by the swipe through the cool, creamy butter, and then the flavors of both are brought out by the salt. The radishes are so cold and crunchy and spicy, and they have a mildly sulfuric note. The butter is unexpectedly sweet in contrast. It’s addictive.

With only three ingredients, there is nowhere to hide. You want clean, fresh, firm, small radishes with lively looking, robust leafy green tops (which are very good in salads). The yellowing cello-packed radishes, sweating in their own condensation, are out of the question here. In fact, I am rarely preachy about this kind of thing, and I love a grocery store much more than I like a farmers’ market, but I think they are out of the question anywhere. They’re gross.