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Dandelion
The leaves of this common field plant make an excellent salad. They should be washed, dried, placed in a salad bowl, and dressed with oil, vinegar, salt, and mustard in the usual way. Or they may be cooked in the same way as spinach, with the addition of a couple of table-spoonfuls of good gravy or stock.
A two-line entry that assumes you already know how to dress a salad and cook spinach. The variables it leaves out are the ones that decide whether dandelion is pleasant or punishing.
- Pick young leavesGather or buy leaves before the plant flowers; once it bolts the bitterness turns harsh and the ribs go stringy. The pale inner leaves of a rosette are the mildest part.
- Where you gather mattersAvoid roadsides, lawns treated with herbicide or weedkiller, and ground used by dogs. Cultivated dandelion (often sold as Italian catalogna or cicoria) is the safe substitute, though it is a related chicory rather than true Taraxacum.
- Dressing proportionsThe recipe leaves 'the usual way' undefined. A common proportion is about three parts oil to one of vinegar, with the mustard worked in first to help hold the emulsion. Dandelion is bitter enough to take a sharper dressing than lettuce, and a little sugar or honey is not out of place.
- Dry the leaves properlyThe instruction to dry them is not filler. Water clinging to the leaves thins the dressing and it slides off, leaving the salad both bitter and bland.
- Cooking "like spinach"In this period that meant washing, then wilting in the water left clinging to the leaves, covered, before draining and pressing. Dandelion is tougher than spinach: give it 5 to 8 minutes rather than 2, and drain it hard before adding the gravy.
- The two tablespoonfuls of gravyThis is the hinge of the cooked version. Meat stock or pan gravy blunts the bitterness with fat and salt, which may be why the recipe specifies "good" gravy; water or a thin vegetable stock will not do the same work. Bacon fat achieves the same end and is traditional in Pennsylvania Dutch cookery.
- Blanching optionIf the leaves are older than you would like, a brief boil in plenty of salted water, then draining, removes a good deal of the bitter latex before the final cooking.
- YieldDandelion collapses dramatically. Reckon a large colander of raw leaves, about 1 lb, to serve two as a cooked vegetable, or four as salad.
Dandelion has been eaten as a spring green across Europe for centuries, valued less as a vegetable in its own right than as the first bitter thing available after winter — the French pissenlit, whose name points to the plant's long-standing reputation as a diuretic, and the Italian dente di leone, which like the English dandelion refers to the toothed leaf. Its presence in Cassell's reflects a Victorian habit of listing hedgerow and field plants alongside market produce: a household with a garden or a servant who knew the fields could get a salad for nothing in March. The bitterness that limits its appeal now was part of its point then, bitter greens being widely held to be cleansing after a heavy winter diet of salt meat and root vegetables. The cooked version, finished with meat gravy, follows the same logic as the older English treatment of nettles, sorrel and other wild leaves — tame the wildness with fat and salt from the roasting pan.