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Endive, Dressed
There are many varieties of endive: the green curled sort is principally used for salads. Those who like the bitterness of this vegetable will find it, when cooked according to the recipes here given, a wholesome and agreeable change during the summer. The green leaves may be boiled like those of any other vegetable, only changing the water twice to take off the bitterness. After boiling till tender, throw the endive into cold water for ten minutes; then squeeze out the water, and when dry chop and stew with butter, gravy, or, like spinach, beat it smooth, and serve round cutlets, or alone, with bread sippets as a garnish. Time to boil, half an hour. Probable cost, 1d. to 2d. per head.
A Victorian method for cooking curly endive as a hot vegetable rather than a salad. The instructions are sound in outline, but the timing and the water-changing belong to an era of much more bitter, tougher-leaved plants.
- Which endiveThis means Cichorium endivia — the frizzy, pale-hearted head sold as frisée or curly endive — not the pale torpedo-shaped Belgian endive (witloof) sold under the same name in North America. Escarole is the broad-leaved variety of the same plant and works identically here.
- Half an hour is far too longThirty minutes gives grey, structureless leaf. Five to eight minutes in boiling salted water is enough to bring modern curly endive to tender; test the thick white ribs at the base, which are what actually need the time.
- Changing the waterThis book changes the water twice to leach out the bitterness, which also leaches out much of the flavour. One boiling is usually enough — or blanch briefly, refresh, and let the butter and gravy carry the remaining bitterness, which is the point of the dish.
- The cold water plungeThis is the useful instruction and worth keeping. Dropping the drained leaves into cold water stops the cooking and fixes the colour; ten minutes is generous, two is plenty. Then squeeze hard — endive holds an extraordinary amount of water and will dilute whatever you dress it with.
- GravyIn Victorian usage gravy here means meat stock or the pan juices from a roast, not a thickened flour sauce. A few spoonfuls of good brown stock reduced with the butter gives the intended result; a splash of cream instead makes the spinach-style purée version.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter or dripping until crisp, set around the edge of the dish as a garnish. They will soften in any liquid the endive gives up, so set them in place at the last moment.
- QuantityEndive collapses like spinach. Reckon one large head per two people as a side dish, and more if you are serving it as a bed for cutlets.
- Cost1d. to 2d. per head, which puts endive at the cheap end of the vegetable entries and suggests everyday household cooking rather than company food.
Endive and its close relative chicory were kitchen-garden staples in Britain long before they were salad-bar items, and Cassell's treats the plant the way most nineteenth-century English cookery treated bitter greens: boil it, change the water to tame it, then enrich it with butter and meat juices. The instruction to "beat it smooth" and serve it as a bed for cutlets is borrowed wholesale from the handling of spinach. The note that it makes "a wholesome and agreeable change during the summer" reflects the older growing calendar. The practice of blanching the growing heads under a pot or tile to whiten and sweeten the hearts, generally traced to Continental market gardening, was well established in English gardens by this date.