Spring Salad with Pancetta

The actual name of this salad is Broad Bean, Pea, Mint, Goats’ Cheese and Fried Pancetta Salad. A mouthful, pun intended. This is a fabulous salad that just screams spring to me. It’s from the book Charcuterie, by Miranda Ballard, published in 2014. She has published another of the same name in 2018 which I don’t own.

My mother gifted me the book. She is well aware of my love for charcuterie that began as a child; I especially loved just about any German sausage. I loved the pop of the sausage casings when I bit into them.

I also own another book called Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, published in 2013.

The cookbook by Ms. Lambert offers recipes utilizing a variety of charcuterie, which is where I discovered the beautiful spring salad with pancetta. The Ruhlman/Polcyn cookbook instructs how to make your own charcuterie. By looking at the covers of these two books, I want to point out that only meat is in the photos. Why? Because charcuterie is meat – cured, salted, smoked.

When I see the name “charcuterie board” and it’s only vegetables, or god forbid – candy – I really cringe. Yes, I had a French mother, so yes, I knew what the word meant from from an early age, but we all have cookbooks and google. At least call it a meat and cheese board.

Actually, forget what I said about google. Just because googling is possible, it doesn’t make anything ultimately correct. I actually saw a subject entitled charcuterie cheeses. What??!!

I also keep seeing the misrepresentation of the pronunciation of charcuterie. I wish I had a video of my mother reacting to waiters over the years saying char-COO-ter-y! She’s never been tolerant of poorly spoken French. I’m not so critical, especially because it’s really a tough word to pronounce correctly. And FYI the French don’t put accents on syllables, so there’s no COO.

You can certainly choose to not care about this. Many culinary terms have expanded to various usages, like strudel and coulis and pesto. I get it. But let’s be educated.

This salad turned out even better than I’d anticipated, although I ended up taking photos of it without first adding the pancetta. It was still really good, but what a silly mistake! I added some sliced strawberries for color and sweetness, and those worked well. I did omit the mint because my husband wanted to partake in this salad, which is almost more like a warm vegetable side dish, and he doesn’t like mint!

Broad Bean, Pea, Mint, Goats’ Cheese and Fried Pancetta Salad
Printable recipe below

4 1/2 ounces pancetta, finely diced
14 ounces fava beans, shelled (I also used some sugar snap peas
Scant 2 cups fresh or frozen peas
4 tablespoons butter
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
A small handful of fresh mint leaves, chopped
1 tablespoon freshly chopped parsley
Freshly squeezed juice of 1/2 lemon
4 1/4 ounces soft goats’ cheese, torn into chunks
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Start by frying the pancetta in a hot frying pan until it’s crisp and browned. Remove from the pan to a plate, but keep the pan on the stove.

Steam the fava beans first.

Cook the fava beans, sugar snap peas, and peas over boiling water for 4 minutes, or until the broad beans soften. Drain and set aside.

Add butter to the frying pan over medium heat, then add the garlic and allow that to become fragrant. Add the beans, peas, mint, parsley, lemon juice, and a pinch of salt and mix well.

Remove from the heat and transfer to a salad bowl. Put the goats’ cheese and pancetta on top. Crunch plenty of black pepper over and serve immediately. As you can see I also added a couple of sliced strawberries. And forgot the pancetta.

I’ve blogged about another recipe from the same book – cabbage and chorizo salad, shown below. It was fabulous!