Pick, wash and drain 2 heads of lettuce and break into pieces. Mix with some watercress, shredded celery and a few leaves of mint. Put in a salad bowl, sprinkle with salt, pepper, sugar and lemon-juice and pour over a salad-dressing. Garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs and pickled beet-root.
June 2 — No. 2
English
A cold salad with no cooking beyond the eggs and the beets, so the only real decisions are the dressing and how far ahead you assemble it.
- Two heads of lettuceMost likely a loose butterhead or cos type rather than a dense crisphead. Two heads of Boston or Bibb, or one large romaine, gives roughly the right volume for four.
- "A salad-dressing"The book assumes you know one, and gives no recipe. An oil-and-vinegar dressing or a boiled cream dressing would both fit; a vinaigrette of three parts oil to one part lemon or wine vinegar suits the ingredients here.
- Seasoning before the dressingThe salt, pepper, sugar and lemon juice go directly onto the leaves first, before the dressing is poured over. The effect is to season the lettuce itself rather than the dressing. Use no more than a pinch of sugar.
- MintA few leaves means a few. Tear rather than chop, and keep it to four or five leaves for the whole bowl, or it dominates the watercress.
- Dress at the tableDress late -- Watercress and butterhead leaves wilt quickly once acid is on them, so sprinkle and dress shortly before serving.
- Pickled beetrootSold in jars; drain it well and add it last, laid on top, or the whole salad turns pink.
- YieldNo yield is given; two heads of lettuce will stretch to about four as a side salad, or two as a light main course with bread and cheese.
The book runs a dish for every day of the year, with each entry labelled by nationality — the neighbouring days here are Italian and Scotch. This English salad combines lettuce, cress and celery, seasoned with sugar as well as salt, and finished with hard-boiled egg and pickled beetroot. Sugar and hard-boiled yolks appear in some nineteenth-century English salad dressings, including in Mrs Beeton, and boiled or cream dressings were common in Britain alongside the French oil-and-vinegar mixture. Watercress was cheap and widely available in Britain by this date, grown commercially in chalk streams in Hampshire and elsewhere and carried into the cities by rail, which is why it appears so casually here as a bulk salad green rather than a garnish.