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Wilted Lettuce
Place in a vegetable dish lettuce that has been very carefully picked and washed each leaf by itself, to remove all insects. Cut across the dish four or five times, and sprinkle with salt. Fry a small piece of fat ham until brown, cut it in small pieces; when very hot add cup of good vinegar, and pour it boiling hot over the lettuce; mix it well with a fork, and garnish with slices of hardboiled eggs. Be certain to have the fat so hot that when vinegar is poured in, it will boil immediately. Add half a cup or a cup of vinegar according to strength of vinegar and quantity of lettuce.
A hot bacon dressing poured over raw greens — the whole dish depends on the fat being hot enough to make the vinegar boil on contact. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: heatThe fat must be at frying temperature when the vinegar goes in, and the mixture must still be bubbling when it hits the leaves. Dressing that has cooled merely wets the lettuce; boiling dressing collapses it to the silky, half-cooked texture the name promises.
- Which lettuceThis wants loose leaf or garden lettuce — the soft, thin-leaved kind that would have come out of a kitchen garden in spring. Iceberg will not wilt properly, and romaine hearts stay stubbornly crisp. Leaf lettuce, butterhead, or a mix with young spinach works.
- Fat hamThe cut meant here is the fatty edge of a cured ham, rendered for its drippings. Thick-cut bacon is the practical stand-in: fry a few slices until brown, cut them into small pieces as the recipe directs, and leave the fat in the pan.
- Vinegar strengthThe recipe hedges between half a cup and a cup for good reason. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely; modern cider vinegar is standardised at about 5 percent acidity and is fairly sharp. Start with half a cup for a large bowl of lettuce and taste before adding more.
- SaltingSalt the cut leaves lightly before dressing, not after — it draws moisture and helps the greens give way. The ham and its fat bring their own salt, so go easy.
- InsectsThe instruction to wash each leaf individually is not fussiness about grit but about aphids and small caterpillars in garden lettuce. Bagged supermarket greens need only a rinse; anything from a garden or market stall still deserves the leaf-by-leaf treatment.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe gives no yield; a head of leaf lettuce with this dressing will serve three or four as a side. It should go to the table immediately, as dressed leaves slump quickly.
Wilted lettuce belongs to the spring-greens tradition of the German-settled Midwest and Pennsylvania — Speck or ham fat, vinegar and whatever came up first in the garden, a dish that turned cured pork into a dressing for the first of the new season's leaves. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio and first published in 1877, sat squarely in that culinary region, and versions of the same idea appear under names like hot slaw and wilted greens in cookbooks across the same belt. It is worth noticing what the recipe assumes: that lettuce is seasonal, and that vinegar is of unpredictable strength — which is why the last sentence leaves the quantity to the cook's judgement, according to both the strength of the vinegar and the amount of lettuce.