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Dandelion Salad
Select the young tender leaves of the dandelion. Wash well, and lay in ice water for an hour. Drain, and dry by laying them between the folds of a napkin. Turn into a chilled dish and mix lightly with a French dressing. Serve at once.
A three-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the leaves themselves. Everything here is about getting them young, clean and bone dry.
- Pick before the flowerDandelion leaves turn sharply bitter once the plant sends up a bud, so gather in early spring while the rosette is flat and the leaves are pale at the base. Greens sold in shops as "dandelion" are sometimes a cultivated chicory rather than true dandelion; either will serve, though bitterness varies.
- Where you gather mattersAvoid roadsides, lawn edges and any ground that may have been treated with herbicide or used by dogs. Cut the leaves at the crown rather than pulling, and wash in several changes of water — dandelion holds grit in the toothed margins.
- The ice water is not optionalAn hour in ice water is what makes limp foraged leaves crisp and may draw off a little of the bitterness. Shorter soaks work if the leaves are very young; much longer risks waterlogging them.
- Dry them completelyThe napkin stands in for a salad spinner. Any water left clinging thins the dressing and it slides straight to the bottom of the bowl.
- French dressing, period senseIn books of this era that means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in America today. A little Dijon helps it cling.
- Dress at the tableMix and serve within a minute or two, as the recipe insists; dressed greens lose their crispness quickly.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no amounts; as a rough guide, a large colander of loosely packed leaves, perhaps 6 to 8 ounces, would give four small side salads.
Dandelion was a spring tonic long before it was a salad course: the young greens were among the first edible things to appear after winter in both European and American kitchen gardens, and eating them was widely held to "clear the blood" after months of salt meat and root vegetables. The name comes through French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf. By the time this book was compiled, the plant was thoroughly naturalised across North America and cost nothing, which is part of why household compendiums of the period gave it a place beside lettuce and endive in the salad chapter. French dressing and chilled greens mark it as a genteel treatment of what was, for many families, simply what grew in the yard.