Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Eleni Pappas

In my most recent springtimes, I’ve found myself in unfamiliar kitchens in old French chateaus, kitchens with opinionated ovens, outdated gadgets and only modest refrigerator or freezer space. It all matters very little amid the wisteria and the hundred-year-old roses, the honk of the aging peacock outside my door, who guards me fiercely and takes pleasure in abusing everyone, it seems, except me. (His love was earned with day-old gougères, but it made me nice and smug, however cheap.) The days are long, the setting is rural and the whole backdrop, the whole experience, create a certain cycle in the kitchen and in me, a ritual of shaking off winter and embracing simplicity and lightness.

Recipe: French Lentil Salad

Even as I sit today, not in France but in cold, rainy New York, I feel that lightness percolating in my life and my kitchen. I start to reposition my vinegars — out of a yearning for any kind of salad — in a place of esteem on my shelves and countertops. And I turn to heartier salads, cold, fresh and whimsical, to ease the transition. I start scheming up dishes that can sit in my fridge for days, that I can add ingredients to as flavors change and develop, that I can throw into a repurposed jelly jar and take with me on a train or a plane or to the park. These kinds of salads — small, joyful luxuries — give me so much pleasure and satisfaction that it is nearly embarrassing. Alas, beauty is embarrassing.

My favorite of these salads, the one that brings me most joy, is my French lentil salad, a recipe that’s simple, generous, adaptable and reliable, and inspired by these trips overseas. This lentil salad is a staple easily found in French grocery-store deli cases, cafes and roadside routiers (what Americans might call truck stops). In fact, that was where I enjoyed my first taste, perched on a rental-car bumper midway from Paris to Toulouse, the smell of diesel wafting in the breeze, little dogs stretching their legs on the grassy parking-lot knolls, humans foraging for something that might keep them going until their next stop.