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Lettuce, Stewed
Trim away the outer leaves and the bitter stalks from four good-sized lettuces; wash them carefully, and boil them in plenty of salted water until they are tender. Lift them into a colander, and squeeze the water from them; chop them slightly, and put them into a clean saucepan with a little pepper and salt and a small piece of butter. Dredge a little flour on them, pour over them three table-spoonfuls of good gravy, and simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, stirring all the time. Squeeze a dessert-spoonful of vinegar or lemon-juice upon them, and serve as hot as possible, with fried sippets round the dish. Time, altogether, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian way with lettuce that treats it as a hot vegetable rather than salad. The whole thing hangs on not overboiling the leaves before they ever reach the pan.
- Choose the right lettuceUse firm cos/romaine or a dense butterhead, four heads for six people. Loose modern leaf lettuces and bagged salad collapse to nothing and turn slimy; they will not survive the boil.
- Boil briefly, not "until tender"Romaine hearts need two to four minutes in salted water, no more. The stated three-quarters of an hour is total working time, not boiling time, but Victorian palates accepted far softer vegetables than we do.
- Squeeze hardLettuce is about 95 per cent water and the dish fails if it is wet. Press the drained leaves firmly in a colander, or wring them in a clean tea towel, before chopping.
- Good gravyThis means meat stock or the reduced juices from a roast, not thickened brown sauce from a jar. Three tablespoons of well-flavoured beef or veal stock is the intent; a strong stock reduced by half works.
- Dredging flourA scant teaspoon scattered over the hot buttered lettuce is enough to bind the small amount of liquid. More will taste raw and pasty in fifteen minutes of gentle simmering.
- Simmering timeA quarter of an hour is long for already-cooked greens. Five minutes over low heat is enough to marry the butter, flour and stock; longer and the colour goes drab olive.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or dripping until crisp, arranged around the edge of the serving dish. Croutons cut large serve the same purpose.
- Cost and yield8d. is Victorian money, under a shilling. As written it fills a vegetable dish for six as a side; as a lunch dish for two or three, serve it on toast.
Cooked lettuce reads oddly now but was ordinary in British and French kitchens well into the twentieth century: lettuce was a garden glut crop, and a gardener with more heads than the salad bowl could take had to cook the surplus or waste it. The technique here — boil, drain, press, finish in butter with a little stock and an acid squeeze at the end — is close to the usual English treatment for leafy greens of the period, and much the same method turns up for spinach and sorrel. The French braised equivalent, laitues braisées, cooks the heads whole in stock.