Three Stages of Bean Salad

Life is difficult these days. So I decided to share this photo I took at lunch. I could call this "Three Stages of Be-in' Salad," but I thought I'd save it for the text of this post rather than for the title.

The three stages are raw, sprouted, and, for want of a better term, cooked. We have raw green beans, sprouted mung beans, and lightly browned tofu (made from soy beans and bought at the store).

There is also some shredded cabbage (green and purple) in there, as well as some chopped scallions.

This salad is great with every kind of dressing, but today I had it with tahini dressing. Here's how I make it:

Put a nice spoonful of sesame tahini in a bowl, and splash in an equal amount of cider vinegar (the kind with "the mother" tastes best). If you don't have cider vinegar, lemon juice works as well.

I actually started using cider vinegar instead of lemon juice, and like the taste more.

Mix them together to form a very thick paste.

Slowly add some water, and the mixture will become thick (a different kind of thick), and white.

You can add salt to this mixture, or you can add soy sauce. You can add spices like powered garlic, or even ginger. Anything your heart desires.

I started making this back in the 1970s when I used to go to Amy's at 77th and Broadway in New York, on the way home from a hard day of practice at Juilliard. It was freely available in big a dispenser with little cups. My friends and I used to consume the contents of so many of those cups that the dispenser was, eventually, disbanded.

Before I learned the term "deconstruction," which Jacques Derrida wrote about in 1967, is "not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new . . .," I deconstructed the Amy's tahini sauce.

I knew, from the name, that it had tahini in it, and I tasted lemon and salt. When I mixed the two ingredients it turned, to my surprise, into a paste. I decided to thin it with a little water, and was thrilled to see that it had the same texture as the Amy's sauce. But it was a bit bitter. I balanced the bitterness by adding some salt. And there you have it.

There you have it: the tension between memory and fidelity (the emulsification of the oil by the acid), that results in the creation of something new. And as far as preservation goes, the mixture will stay good in the refrigerator for some time. But since it is good on everything, you might never find out how long.