Radish and Butter Tartines

As a defiant response to Sad Desk Lunches, the Food52 team works to keep our midday meals both interesting and pretty. Each week, we’ll be sharing our happiest desk lunches — and we want to see yours, too.

Today: Keep things simple — and French — with spring’s most perfect lunch: radish tartines with butter and salt. 

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The art of eating lunch at one’s desk requires a bit of make-believe: Make believe you are in a fancy restaurant! Make believe you are enjoying a leisurely meal in Alice Waters’ garden! Make believe you are in France!

If you’ve chosen option number three and are feeling gallic, a radish tartine is just the thing. All it requires is some good bread, some good (salted!) butter, a few radishes — your cheapest option at the market these days — and a few flakes of salt. It is a perfect spring food, and needs no elaboration. 

More: You could also toss your radishes with white beans and tarragon, for a petit salade.

I just googled the French words for “desk” and “lunch” and they are, respectively, bureau and déjeuner. Very elegant! The word for radish, radis, leaves a little something to be desired — it sounds like something you’d study in geometry, or a typo. But luckily you still have beurre, and sel, and, antithetically, pain, a word whose meaning completely reverses when turned into italicized francaise. Repeat them over and over to yourself as you assemble your lunch, and your bureau will begin to feel like a bistro.

You can even make believe that your plastic, cafeteria-issue knife is made of silver, with a decades-old patina. I’ll play along.

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Radish and Butter Tartines

Makes one

One thick slice of hearty bread, toasted if you like
Best-quality salted butter
A few radishes
Flaky salt

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Tell us: What’s your favorite springtime lunch to eat at the office?

Photo by Mark Weinberg