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Stewed Lettuce
Wash the desired number of heads of lettuce, cutting off the stalks at the roots, and put into a saucepan with 1 onion sliced, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to taste, with a very little water, to cook slowly for 2 hours. By this time the water should have pretty well cooked away, leaving the lettuce fairly dry. Remove from it the onion and parsley, put into a dish, dress well with melted butter and send to table hot.
A plain braise of lettuce, from a book written to demonstrate a then-new shortening. The one figure to ignore is the cooking time.
- Two hours is far too longBraised lettuce collapses in 20 to 30 minutes over low heat. Two hours in a covered pan will reduce it to brown threads. Cook until the ribs give to a knife and the leaves are silky, then stop.
- Which lettuceThis wants a dense, thick-ribbed head: romaine, Little Gem, or a tight butterhead. Loose-leaf and iceberg are wrong here, the first because it disintegrates, the second because it weeps water and tastes of nothing once hot.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the reason this book exists. Any neutral fat works, though butter or a spoonful of good oil gives more flavour, since the dish is finished with butter regardless.
- "A very little water"Two or three tablespoons in a heavy pan with a tight lid. The lettuce releases a great deal of its own liquid; the aim is a wet braise that ends dry, so uncover for the last few minutes if there is still a pool.
- Wash and drain properlyGrit lodges at the base of the ribs, and there is no rinse later to save you. Split the heads lengthwise, wash between the leaves, then shake them well before they go in the pan.
- Removing the aromaticsSlicing the onion thickly and keeping the parsley in a whole sprig or two makes them easy to lift out at the end, as instructed. Chopped parsley cannot be retrieved.
- SeasoningSalt lightly at the start and correct at the end. The volume reduces by more than half, and lettuce braised dry concentrates quickly.
- YieldReckon one medium head per person as a side dish. A squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of cream stirred into the pan juices is a common finish and does the dish no harm.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which came on the market in 1911; the recipes are ordinary domestic cooking with the new shortening written into nearly every one, and this stewed lettuce is a fair example of a dish that neither needs nor is improved by it. Cooked lettuce has a long history of its own, alongside the salad habit that eventually eclipsed it. Lettuce was a pot herb in European kitchens as well as a raw green, braised with onion and butter or stewed into soups and pea dishes, and the French laitues braisées served under a joint of veal is the same idea dressed better. The instruction to "send to table hot" is standard period cookbook idiom.