I strongly urge you to make this. It is satisfying in every way – to make and to eat. If you are at all worried about making your own mayonnaise rest assured that the addition of tuna in its base makes it far more stable. Change the herbs if you like – I enjoy coriander – but just don’t add sweetcorn, please. Beetroots? Carrots? The difficulty is in deciding what to leave out – green beans? Apple? Eat it with bread.
preserved sustainable tuna 250g of the best quality salted anchovies 4 egg 1 yolk celeriac 250g potatoes 250g Romanesco broccoli or cauliflower 200g peppers from a bottle or tin 2 peas 100g, frozen or jarred inner heart of celery 1 parsley a small bunch salted capers 1 tbsp, rinsed of salt black olives 2 tbsp gherkin 1 Dijon mustard 1 tbsp lemon 1 wine vinegar 1 tbsp olive oil 250ml sea salt black pepper
To make the sauce, drain the tuna and put with an egg yolk into a food processor adding the juice of half a lemon, a sprinkle of salt, 2 of the anchovy fillets and the mustard. Blitz to a paste, stopping halfway through and scrapping down the sides of the bowl. With the machine running, add 250ml of olive oil in a thin stream over a minute to produce a thick mayonnaise. Taste for seasoning – as often as not, I’ll add the juice of the rest of the lemon at this stage. Chill.
If using frozen, cook the peas in a pan under a lid with a teaspoon of oil, a pinch of salt and a little water. Cook like this for 10 minutes until they lose their colour a bit. Peel and dice the potato, celeriac and celery into the size of small sugar cubes. Keep separate. Cut the Romanesco or cauliflower into florets roughly the same size. Cook the potatoes in a pot of salted boiling water for roughly 8 minutes, adding the celeriac after 4 minutes, and the Romanesco and celery after 6. Drain well and toss in a large bowl with 1 tbsp of vinegar and the peas. Leave to cool.
Cut the peppers into squares of the required size, the olives and gherkin, too. To these add the capers, the remaining anchovies torn into pieces and the parsley roughly chopped.
Line a bowl with clingfilm and mix everything together. Fill the bowl and chill in the fridge for at least an hour. Turn out on to a plate and garnish with extra parsley.
