A Simple Garden Salad with English Mustard Vinaigrette

The garden is doing what it does in July: producing more than you planned for. The lettuce has bolted twice already but there's a new head of butter lettuce that's just right, pale and soft, the leaves cupped like hands. The radishes pulled this morning are still cold from the soil. The cucumber doesn't need much. Neither does any of this.

A salad like this is barely a recipe. It's an assembly. But the dressing is where the quiet work happens, and English mustard is the thing that makes it distinctly ours. Not Dijon, not wholegrain, not anything polite. Colman's, from the tin if you've got it, mixed to a paste that clears the sinuses and makes the back of your throat pay attention. Tamed with a little vinegar, a touch of honey, and enough good oil to bring it all into line. It's sharp, warm, and entirely honest.

I make this salad from May through to September, adjusting as the weeks go by. Early summer gets the first radishes and spring onions. High summer brings the cucumbers and whatever herbs are sprawling across the path. The dressing stays the same. The market decides the rest. We're only making dinner.

Put this next to a piece of grilled fish, beside a chicken that's just come off the barbecue, or on its own with some bread and cheese on a warm evening when cooking feels like too much and eating in the garden feels like exactly enough.