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Lettuce, Garden Cress and Onion Salad
Separate the crisp heart leaves of two heads of lettuce; arrange them on a shallow serving dish to represent a full-blown rose. Pick over, wash and dry a bunch of garden cress, chop finely and sprinkle over lettuce leaves. Chop one small onion very fine and mix with French dressing. Pour over lettuce. Serve at once.
A plain composed salad whose only real technique is the arrangement and the timing. Two things need translating: what "garden cress" meant in 1913, and what French dressing meant before bottled versions existed.
- Garden cressThis is Lepidium sativum — peppery cress grown on soil, sold now as curly cress and closest at hand as the cress sprouts sold in punnets. (Beware "land cress" or "upland cress", which is usually a different plant, Barbarea verna.) Watercress is a fair substitute but wetter and coarser; use only the leaves and top stems if you swap it in.
- French dressing meant vinaigretteIn American books of this period French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name. Make about 1/4 cup for two heads of lettuce.
- Two heads of lettuce is less than it soundsOnly the crisp heart leaves are used, so two heads yield perhaps four small servings. The recipe leaves the outer leaves unaccounted for, presumably for some other use.
- Dry the leaves properlyThe hinge of the recipe. Any water clinging to lettuce or cress thins the dressing and it slides straight to the bottom of the dish. Spin or pat everything bone dry before assembling.
- The onion goes in the dressing, not on the saladMixing the minced onion into the vinaigrette first lets the vinegar take the raw edge off and distributes it evenly. Five minutes of standing is enough; longer and the onion dominates.
- "Serve at once" is literalDress only as it goes to the table. Cress wilts within minutes of meeting vinegar, and the rose arrangement collapses.
- YieldFour small side salads; in a book of this kind the salad is a light course within a larger dinner rather than a meal in itself.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) organised its menus through the year by month. Garden cress was a standard kitchen-garden crop in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, quick from seed and grown for its sharp mustard-family bite; it is now met with far more often as watercress or as sprouts sold in punnets. The instruction to arrange the leaves "to represent a full-blown rose" belongs to the elaborate plating style of the period, when salads in American household manuals were often built into flowers, nests and baskets. The dressing, then as now called French, is the plain oil-and-vinegar formula that Anglo-American cookbooks had been printing under that name since at least the later nineteenth century.