My salad days

Obey the rules and there are few finer things than a salade Niçoise served in the shade of an old olive tree, believes Tom Parker Bowles

- Tom Parker Bowles

JACQUES MÉDECIN was born in Nice Jand elected as its mayor in 1966, years. Wildly popular among the electorate, he was also a notorious racist and fraudster. After allegations of corruption grew ever louder in the 1980s (helped, in part, by Graham Greene's famed pamphlet J'Accuse), he fled France for Uruguay, before being arrested, extradited back home and jailed. So what, I hear you cry, does this shameless old crook have to do with salade Niçoise, save sharing the same city of birth?

Well, for all his flagrant flaws (he was a vocal supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa and even proposed a town twinning link between Nice and Cape Town), Médecin was also the author of Cuisine Niçoise, first published in 1972 and a bona fide classic. 'If I were asked why I wrote this book,' he says in his preface, it would be 'because I love Nice, its surrounding countryside, its pretty girls and their strapping young escorts, its arts, its flowers, fruit and vegetables, and, of course, its cooking.' He may have been bent as a nine-Franc note, but he sure knew his food.