Lettuce Salad
Choose the crisp centre leaves of the head lettuce. Wash them, if necessary, and dry thoroughly and carefully with a soft towel. Break or tear the leaves into convenient pieces with a silver fork. Cover with a French dressing, turn the whole upside down to mix it well, and serve immediately. It is customary in this country to serve mayonnaise with lettuce salad, but after one has had a heavy dinner the simple French dressing is more refreshing.
The following may be made and served the same as lettuce salad :- Water cress Sorrel Dandelions Nasturtium blossoms Peppergrass Corn salad
A method rather than a formula, and the instructions that matter are the ones about water and timing. Everything here depends on leaves that are bone dry and dressed at the last second.
- Dry thoroughly is the hingeDressing will not cling to wet leaves; it slides off and pools as a watery film at the bottom of the bowl. A salad spinner does in ten seconds what the soft towel does in a minute, and either is worth the trouble.
- The silver forkCarbon-steel blades of the period could react with acidic foods and leave a metallic taste, which is the usual reason period recipes call for silver where vinegar or greens are involved. Modern stainless is inert; tear by hand, which bruises the leaves less than an implement.
- "Turn the whole upside down"This means tossing by inverting the leaves from the bottom of the bowl up, not stirring. Two large spoons or clean hands, a few lifts only — over-tossing crushes butterhead lettuce into a slick.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to a temporary emulsion, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. Not the sweet orange bottled dressing that took the name in mid-century America.
- Head lettuceIn this period that meant a soft butterhead or an early crisphead, not the dense iceberg of later decades. Bibb, Boston or the heart of a romaine all suit the recipe.
- On the substitute greensSorrel and peppergrass are sharply acidic and peppery — use them as a proportion of a mixed bowl rather than alone, and cut the vinegar accordingly. Cultivated dandelion is far milder than the wild plant, which turns bitter once it flowers.
- Nasturtium blossomsEdible, mildly peppery, and still worth using; the leaves and green seed pods are as well. Take them from plants you know have not been sprayed.
- Serve immediatelySalt and acid begin drawing water out of the leaves within a couple of minutes. Dress at the table if you can.
The note on mayonnaise records a real difference in national habit: American tables of the period leaned heavily on thick boiled and mayonnaise-style dressings for greens, while the plain oil-and-vinegar mixture was identified with French practice, hence the name. The list of alternative greens — cress, sorrel, dandelion, peppergrass, corn salad — reflects a period when salad still drew on kitchen-garden and gathered plants rather than a single year-round lettuce, and most of them were more familiar to a cook in 1900 than they are now. Corn salad, or mâche, takes its English name from its habit of springing up in grain fields.