not everyone likes capers…

…but not everyone matters.

One night last spring I was in the mood for a really punchy veggie dish. The craving was loosely based on one of my favorite French lunches, Salade Niçiose: hard-boiled eggs, tuna, baby potatoes, tomatoes, and haricot verts bathed in vinaigrette and layered atop crisp, leafy lettuce. But for me, the star of the show is always the briny zing of capers and olives. There I was with a healthy pound of beautiful, farm-fresh green beans (which I call greenies) and no desire to boil them down to salty, drab mush. I desperately wanted a Niçiose, but some people in my household object to a few of the ingredients, which left only beans and potatoes as the baseline for my improvised fix. It was looking more mid-western than French at this point.

Choices were made: eggs, tuna, and tomatoes were out and the vinaigrette was elevated to a garlicky, shalloty masterpiece. Somehow I was going to sneak in the olives and capers. I watched my children try to hide peas under mashed potatoes for years so I was confident I had the skills. My son, Sous Chef, joined me in the kitchen that evening, and at some point I asked him to retrieve a giant jar of capers from the pantry. He obliged, but muttered, “You know, not everyone likes capers,” to which I gleefully added, “But not everyone matters.” I might have danced a little jig when I said it. Okay fine, when I sang it. Well, apparently everybody was in earshot of that little exchange, so the capers and olives were served on the side because I’m not a monster. But I was right and dammit, the dish needed capers.

This feisty quip came to me packaged as a pandemic-era Lucille Ball meme which was presumably promoting her forthright, feminist self-reliance. I doubt she ever said this, but it’s catchy. To be confident and secure with your own company would not be an unusual message from Lucy, especially given her wit, aplomb, and outspoken independence. And, of course, she knew as I know that everyone matters – again, not a monster. Context is critical here: within my narrow social ecosystem, the proverbial everyone attempting to disrupt my peace really doesn’t matter to me. But our DNA tends to insist otherwise, so the brutal truth needed to become a meme to remind us. Looking at the bigger picture, I hold all humans as valuable and deserving of equality, dignity, and respect. Yes, even the jerks matter.

Up until now, I’ve been using the word matter as an intransitive verb that means to be of importance, à la “it matters to me that capers are added to the salad.” But as a noun, it could mean the subject under consideration, a disputed issue, general circumstances, a quantity, a substance, or a problem. Zooming farther out from our fragile human egos, matter can have a much grander meaning: “material substance that occupies space, has mass, and is composed predominantly of protons, neutrons, and electrons, that constitutes the observable universe, and that is interconvertible with energy.” ^{Merriam-Webster}

In June, it was this kind of matter that roared into the news with some spectacular images from the world’s largest digital camera. We saw new details of stars and galaxies over 53 million lightyears from Earth and, y’all, I absolutely eat this stuff up. Each time Hubble or Webb has offered a new view of the universe, I’m first in line to be humbled, awed, and often left speechless. There is nothing like a glimpse into the infinite to silence my mortal conceit. As I looked at these staggering photos, I asked myself, do capers even matter at all? Isn’t the mystery of the universe the more consequential matter? Seriously, Betsy, what’s the matter with you? I think I went down the list and managed to demean myself using every definition of my pet word-of-the-month.

Strangely, we spend our lives zooming in, zooming out, and then zooming back in again in a circuitous attempt to determine what matters and how much. We juggle everyday minutia, drama, and general bullshit with spurts of more wide-angle, abstract thinking, but those two extremes don’t always play well together. Even when I’m concentrating in the kitchen, nudging an uncooperative vinaigrette, a little part of my brain is worrying about the expansion of dark matter. Then I’m questioning my choice of Dijon instead of whole-grain mustard and whether I’m using the latter in another timeline. Back and forth I go between nit-picky details and overwhelming wonder. Just awesome…now I have condiment paralysis with a side of metaphysical angst.

How curious to consider which matters matter and what matter matters. All parsing and wordplay aside, this exercise is mentally and emotionally exhausting regardless of how zoomed in or out you are. But it is very rarely binary. When I’ve hyperfocused enough for one day, I do have other options besides existential navel-gazing. Somewhere in between capers and cosmos I’ve found the liminal space to cook and create and dance and laugh. It is really hard to overthink in either direction when you are rocking out in your kitchen to HOT TO GO! with a chopsticks-and-colander drum set.

As for those capers and olives, demoting them to a little pile on the side was an act of deliberate in-between-ness. Why? Because after my “not everyone matters” performance, I needed to be kind more than I wanted to be right. But I still wanted capers more than I needed to change the menu, so I opted for the space in-between. What may seem like waffling or hedging was actually a strategic choice – a strategic choice, but a poor one. As it turned out, everybody didn’t even like my greenies and just pushed them around the plate. Yes, I noticed and yes, I was right all along.

I’m still not a monster…plus more capers for me.

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Niçoise Greenies

This salad could be considered the foundation of a Niçoise and would easily support tuna, eggs, and cherry tomatoes. But when paired with herby, briny potatoes, these greenies bring a full symphony of flavor as is. Also, it is a perfect pairing with a creamy French chicken such as Poulet Gaston Gerard.

Ingredients

• 2 lbs small potatoes
• 1 lb thin green beans or haricot verts
• 2 shallots, finely diced
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• ⅓-½ cup fresh dill, chopped
• 1 tbsp fresh oregano, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, grated
• ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
• ⅓ cup capers, drained
• ½ cup Niçoise or Kalamata olives, halved
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Bring 4ish quarts or so of salted water to boil. Add the potatoes and cook until barely tender, about 10 minutes depending on size. A knife should pierce the skin easily but not completely demolish the spud. Use a slotted ladle or spoon and transfer the potatoes to a colander to cool, but save the boiling water.

Add the green beans to the pot and cook until just tender – maybe 3-4 minutes, but test for a light crunch.

Important: once cooked, immediately plunge the green beans into an ice bath. Drain when completely cooled.

To create a zesty vinaigrette, whisk lemon juice, vinegar, honey, and Dijon in a small bowl. Add shallots, garlic, oregano, dill. Slowly stream in the olive oil and add salt and pepper to taste.

Depending on the size, you may slice potatoes, and then combine with the green beans, capers, and olives in a large bowl. Gently toss the salad with vinaigrette (you may not need all of it) and adjust seasoning. Garnish with fresh dill, parsley, or oregano.

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And finally, my new new word:

liminal (adjective)
: being an intermediate state, phase, or condition :

Merriam-Webster