Home › November › Escarolle Salad
Escarolle Salad
Marinate the bleached leaves of two heads of escarolle with French Dressing. Chill one hour before serving that it may be crisp. Sprinkle thickly with finely chopped chives and a sweet, red, bell pepper chopped very fine or cut in fine thread-like rings.
A four-line salad that depends almost entirely on two things the original assumes you know: what "French Dressing" meant in 1915, and what "bleached" leaves are.
- Escarolle is escaroleThe spelling is period; the plant is the broad-leaved chicory sold today as escarole or Batavian endive. Two heads yields four to six side salads.
- "Bleached leaves" means the pale heartGrowers blanched chicories by tying or covering them so the inner leaves grew ivory and mild. Use the pale yellow-green center; the dark outer leaves are aggressively bitter and are better braised.
- French Dressing, 1915 versionFrench Dressing, period version -- Oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together in roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name. A little paprika or dry mustard would not be out of keeping with dressings of the period.
- The hour in the refrigeratorThis is the one instruction to treat with suspicion. Chicory holds up better than lettuce, but an hour sitting in vinegar and salt draws out water and softens the leaves. Chill the washed, dried leaves for the hour and dress them at the table if you want the crispness the recipe promises.
- Dry the leaves properlyDressing will not cling to wet chicory, and the water dilutes the vinegar. Spin or towel the leaves until they squeak.
- The sweet red pepperAn ordinary red bell pepper. The "thread-like rings" are cut from a cored pepper sliced crosswise as thin as the knife allows — worth doing, since the point is color and crunch against the pale leaves rather than flavor.
- ChivesSnip with scissors rather than chopping; a knife bruises them and turns them dark. "Thickly" here means a genuine covering, a few tablespoons for two heads.
Escarole is a cold-weather crop, sweeter after frost, and chicories were among the few salad plants available once lettuce season had ended. The blanching the recipe takes for granted was a field and cellar practice — heads tied shut, buried in sand, or covered with boards so the inner leaves grew without light and so without bitterness — and it is the same logic that produces Belgian endive. The insistence on a red pepper and green chives over pale leaves reflects the era's strong interest in the visual composition of a salad course; books of this period routinely treat color as a criterion of a well-set table, and this dish is essentially three colors on a plate with a plain vinaigrette holding them together.