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Lettuce, Stuffed
Wash four or five large lettuces. Boil them in plenty of salted water for fifteen minutes. Throw them at once into cold water, and afterwards let them drain. Open them, fill them with good veal forcemeat, tie the ends securely, and put them into a stewpan with as much good gravy as will cover them, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and a tea-spoonful of vinegar. Simmer gently for another fifteen minutes, remove the strings, place them on a hot dish, and pour the gravy round them. If preferred, the lettuces may be prepared as above, and then put into a braising-pan, with thin slices of bacon above and under them. A carrot, an onion stuck with two cloves, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a little good gravy may then be added, and the lettuces simmered gently for an hour and a half. A glassful of sherry may be added to the gravy before it is served. Probable cost of the lettuces, 1d. each. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian treatment of lettuce as a cooked vegetable rather than a salad, in the French manner. The dish stands or falls on the lettuce holding together, which means the right variety and a firm hand with the string.
- Use romaine, not butterheadThe "large lettuces" called for are unspecified, but a long, dense head with a solid rib, such as cos (romaine), is likeliest to survive boiling. Iceberg turns watery and modern soft butterheads collapse into rags.
- Blanch, then shock, then squeezeFifteen minutes in salted water is generous by modern taste; ten is usually enough for a romaine head. The cold water bath is not optional — it sets the colour and firms the leaves. Press the drained heads gently between your palms or in a cloth to get the water out, or the gravy will be thin and the forcemeat sodden.
- Veal forcemeatElsewhere in Cassell's this is minced veal worked with breadcrumbs, suet or butter, egg, lemon peel and herbs. Minced veal is a special order in most places now; ground pork, or pork and veal together, gives the same texture. A sausage-meat stuffing is a fair substitute.
- Cook the stuffing throughThe stuffing goes in raw, and fifteen minutes of gentle simmering will not reliably bring the centre of a fat parcel of minced meat to 74C/165F. Keep the rolls small and slim, or use the braising method below, and check with a probe before serving.
- "Good gravy" means stockIn this book gravy is a strong brown veal or beef stock, not a thickened pan sauce. Use a well-reduced unsalted stock; the recipe's teaspoonful of added salt assumes an unseasoned liquid and will be too much with a commercial one.
- The braised version is the better dishBacon above and below, carrot, clouted onion and herbs, an hour and a half at a bare simmer — a braise on a bed of vegetables, and it gives far more flavour than the fifteen-minute stew. If the hob will not stay low enough, cover the pan and hold it in a low oven, just hot enough to keep the liquid barely trembling.
- TyingFold the leaves over the filling to make a compact roll and tie in two or three places with cotton kitchen twine. Tie firmly: the parcels swell slightly as the forcemeat cooks.
- Yield and costFour or five heads serve four or five as a light course or a vegetable dish alongside roast meat. "1d. each" is a penny apiece in pre-decimal currency, a note on household economy of no use as a conversion.
Cooked lettuce was ordinary in British and French kitchens long before it became strictly a salad plant: braised, stuffed, or stewed in butter with peas, it used up the coarse outer heads and the plants that had begun to bolt in high summer. Laitues farcies in the French repertoire are made almost exactly this way — blanched, shocked, stuffed with a forcemeat, and braised on a bed of vegetables and bacon — and Cassell's is transmitting the French method to a middle-class household cook who was expected to have veal forcemeat and a stockpot of brown gravy already to hand. The penny-per-head costing, printed as a matter of course, reflects a period when recipe books doubled as budgeting manuals for the mistress checking her cook's accounts.