Dandelion Salad
Gather the dandelion when young and tender. That which is cultivated is well bleached and very tender. Wash thoroughly in several waters, cut off the roots and outside leaves. Drain dry on a cloth or in a wire basket. Arrange in salad bowl. Cut thin sweet bacon in tiny shreds crosswise and sauté in frying pan until crisp; sprinkle bacon over dandelion. To the fat in pan (there should be one-third cup), add one-fourth cup vinegar diluted with two tablespoons water. Heat to boiling point and pour over dandelions; toss leaves with a fork until well mixed with dressing; serve at once. FROZEN STRAWBERRIES-No. 2 2 quarts cream. 2 cups sugar.
Few grains salt. 2 cups strawberry juice and pulp.
PROCESS: Wash and hull strawberries (about three boxes); sprinkle with one cup sugar, cover closely and set aside in a cool place for two hours. Mash and squeeze berries through cheese cloth. Mix remaining cup sugar and salt with cream; turn into freezer and, when half frozen, add strawberries and finish freezing. Serve with Strawberry Sauce.
Two May dishes run together on the page: a wilted dandelion salad dressed with hot bacon fat, and a Philadelphia-style frozen strawberry cream for the same dinner. Both are simple; both depend on timing.
- The hinge: pour the dressing boilingThe dressing must be at a full boil when it hits the leaves, and the salad goes to the table immediately. Fat below boiling slicks the greens without wilting them, and a salad left to stand collapses into something grey and limp.
- Gathering dandelionPick before the plant flowers; once it bolts the leaves turn aggressively bitter. Take nothing from roadsides, dog-walked verges, or any lawn that may have been treated with herbicide. Cultivated dandelion is still sold as pissenlit; note that greens sold as "Italian dandelion" are a chicory rather than true dandelion. The recipe prefers the blanched, milder cultivated plant.
- "Bleached" greensBlanching here means light-deprived, not boiled: growers cover the crowns so the leaves grow pale and tender. If you only have dark wild leaves, expect a much sharper salad and use a little more bacon.
- "Sweet bacon"Period usage generally indicates bacon that is mildly cured rather than heavily salted; it may also imply unsmoked, though usage varied. Modern smoked bacon works, but taste the pan fat before adding vinegar; if it is very salty, the dressing will need no further seasoning.
- The fat measurementOne-third cup of rendered fat is a lot — roughly 6 to 8 ounces of bacon, depending on the cut. Lean modern bacon may well render less, so make up any shortfall with a spoonful of neutral oil rather than reducing the vinegar.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of greens; roughly a pound of trimmed leaves suits this much dressing and will serve about four as a first course. Dandelion wilts hard, so start with a bowl that looks absurdly overfull.
- Frozen strawberries: what the recipe isThis is Philadelphia-style ice cream — cream, sugar, fruit, no eggs or custard. Two quarts of cream plus the fruit is about two and a half quarts of base, well over three quarts once churned, far beyond a 1.5-quart domestic machine. Halve or quarter the recipe to fit one batch.
- "Turn into freezer"The freezer is the hand-cranked bucket packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern churn, chill the cream mixture thoroughly first, churn until it holds soft peaks, then add the strawberry pulp so the fruit stays streaky rather than being whipped in from the start.
- Macerating the berriesTwo hours with sugar draws out the juice and keeps the fruit from freezing into hard chips. The cheesecloth step removes seeds; skip it if you want visible pulp, but do not skip the sugar.
Wilted dandelion salad with hot bacon dressing belongs to the German-American kitchen, particularly Pennsylvania, where it was a spring dish eaten in the narrow window between the first soft ground and the plant's flowering — the same sweet-sour, fat-and-vinegar formula that turns up in German Speckkartoffelsalat. Dandelion was also taken as a spring tonic, a bitter green credited with clearing the blood after a winter of salt meat and stored roots, a belief older than any of the cookbooks that repeat it. By the time this book appeared, seedsmen were selling improved, thick-leaved dandelion for the market garden, which is why the recipe can speak of the cultivated kind as "well bleached and very tender" rather than assuming the reader will go out with a knife. The frozen strawberries beside it show the other face of a May Sunday dinner: ice cream had become a household possibility once the insulated ice-and-salt bucket freezer was cheap and domestic ice delivery routine, and an eggless cream-and-fruit freeze like this one was the simplest thing the machine could be asked to do.