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Lettuce with Cream Dressing
Pick over, wash thoroughly young tender lettuce; cut off the roots and drain. Beat one-half cup heavy cream until solid. Add two tablespoons vinegar diluted with one tablespoon cold water. Add one tablespoon finely chopped chives, one-half teaspoon salt and one-eighth teaspoon pepper. Pour over lettuce, mix well and serve cold.
A whipped-cream dressing of the sort that filled American cookbooks before bottled mayonnaise. It comes together in five minutes, and the only real risk is adding the acid too fast.
- "Beat until solid"Whip the half cup of cream to stiff peaks, but stop as soon as it holds its shape. Another few strokes and it breaks into butter and whey, at which point no amount of vinegar will bring it back.
- Add the acid slowlyDribble the diluted vinegar into the whipped cream a little at a time while stirring gently by hand. Poured in at once it deflates the cream and can curdle it into grainy flecks.
- Which vinegarThe recipe says only 'vinegar'; cider or plain white vinegar is the likeliest reading, though period vinegars varied in strength and were not standardised at the modern 5 percent. Two tablespoons cut with one of water gives a distinctly tart dressing against half a cup of cream; a sharp white wine vinegar works, but balsamic is wrong in both colour and sweetness.
- The lettuce'Young tender lettuce' suggests soft garden lettuce pulled whole, root and all, which is why the recipe tells you to cut off the roots; loose-leaf or butterhead is the closest match. Modern romaine or little gem will do; iceberg sheds too much water to hold a cream dressing well.
- Dry it properlyDrained is not dry. Spin or towel the leaves until no water clings, or the dressing thins on contact and slides to the bottom of the bowl.
- ChivesSnip with scissors rather than chopping with a knife, which bruises them and turns them dark. If you have no chives, the green tops of a spring onion are the nearest substitute.
- Dress at the tableWhipped cream dressings slacken and weep fairly quickly once they meet wet leaves. Mix the dressing ahead and keep it cold, but combine with the leaves just before serving.
- YieldRoughly enough dressing for a large head of leaf lettuce; the recipe gives no yield, but it will stretch to about four as a side salad. Taste the finished dressing for seasoning before it goes on the greens.
Cream dressings were the everyday alternative to boiled or cooked dressings in American home cooking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when oil was comparatively expensive and often of poor quality while cream was on hand daily from the milkman or the family cow. Sour cream versions appear across the German and Central European immigrant kitchens of the Midwest, and sweet cream soured at the table with vinegar, as here, achieves much the same effect. 52 Sunday Dinners is organised as a year of weekly menus, and this one falls in June, when garden lettuce is at its tenderest and chives are up and still soft, before the summer heat turns the leaves bitter and sends the plants to seed.