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Hop Salad
Take some young hops before they are leafy. Boil them in a little salt and water, and when they are partially cooked, but not quite tender, drain and dry them thoroughly, and pour over them a salad-dressing made with lemon-juice instead of vinegar.
A spring vegetable dish that hinges entirely on what you pick: the tender young shoots of the hop bine, gathered before the leaves open, not the resinous flower cones used in brewing. Cone hops would be bitter to the point of inedible here.
- What "young hops" meansThe pale, asparagus-like shoots that push up from the hop crown in early spring, cut at 4-6 inches while still tightly furled. They are sold in season in parts of Belgium, the Netherlands and northern Italy (bruscandoli), and are otherwise a forager's or gardener's crop. If the tips have opened into recognisable hop leaves, they will be tough and grassy.
- Not the brewing hopNothing in this recipe involves hop flowers, pellets or dried cones. Those carry the alpha acids that make beer bitter and are useless in a salad.
- "A little salt and water"Read this as a shallow pan of lightly salted water, just enough to cover. The shoots should be loose in the pan, not crowded.
- Timing"Partially cooked, but not quite tender" is 1-3 minutes depending on thickness, the same handling as thin asparagus. Beyond that they collapse and lose the faint bitterness that is the point of the dish.
- Drain and dry thoroughlyThis is the instruction that decides whether the salad works. Wet shoots dilute the dressing and it slides off; spread them on a towel and pat dry, and let them cool to room temperature before dressing.
- The dressingVictorian "salad-dressing" covered a range of mixtures, from a plain oil-and-acid dressing to thicker egg- or cream-based ones; the recipe does not say which is meant. Three parts good olive oil to one part lemon juice, with salt and pepper, would suit. The recipe gives no reason for preferring lemon to vinegar.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; a generous double handful of shoots will dress two as a starter. Serve at room temperature, alone or with chopped hard-boiled egg, a pairing commonly seen with hop shoots in Belgium.
Hop shoots have a long life as a spring vegetable quite separate from brewing: the same plant that gave bitterness to beer threw up thinnings each spring that the hop-growing districts ate rather than wasted, a practice associated with the Low Countries, northern Italy and the English hop counties. The recipe appears to sit among Cassell's salad entries, at a period when English cookery writers were steadily widening the definition of "salad" beyond lettuce to take in almost any cooked-and-cooled vegetable dressed with oil and acid, a habit borrowed largely from French practice. The substitution of lemon juice for vinegar is a sound instinct in its own right. The shoots were sometimes described as a substitute for asparagus, which tells you both how they were cooked and how they were valued.