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Vegetables: Wash
Wash 4 or 5 heads lettuce, removing thick, bitter stalks and retaining all the sound leaves. Cook in boiling salted water for ten or fifteen minutes, then blanch in cold water. Drain, chop lightly, and heat in a stewpan with butter and pepper to taste, or the chopped lettuce may be heated with a pint of white sauce seasoned with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. After simmering for a few minutes in the sauce, draw to a cooler part of the range and stir in wellbeaten yolks of 2 eggs. Beet Greens.
Wash thoroughly, put into a stewpan, and cover with boiling water. Add a teaspoonful salt for every 2 quarts greens. Boil rapidly for thirty minutes. Drain off the water, chop rather coarsely, season with butter and salt.
Asparagus Tips in Cream.
Cut the tender part of asparagus into short pieces. Add boiling water enough to cover the vegetable, and cook fifteen minutes. Serve in a cream dressing.
Three short vegetable preparations from an era when greens were boiled far longer than anyone would boil them now. The lettuce dish is the interesting one; the other two need their times cut roughly in half.
- The hinge: the egg liaison"Draw to a cooler part of the range" means take the pan off direct heat before the yolks go in. If the sauce boils after the yolks are added it will curdle into scrambled egg; hold it below about 180F and stir until it just thickens.
- Blanch, old senseHere "blanch in cold water" means shock the cooked lettuce in cold water to stop the cooking and set the colour; in modern usage the word usually points to the brief boil itself, though it has covered both. Drain hard, pressing out liquid, or the butter or sauce will be watered down.
- Lettuce cooking timeTen to fifteen minutes turns lettuce to grey pulp. Sturdy heads — romaine, or the outer leaves of iceberg — need two to four minutes in boiling salted water; butterhead needs about one.
- Beet greensThirty minutes of rapid boiling is what this book prescribes, and it destroys both colour and texture. Young beet tops wilt in three to five minutes, older leaves in eight to ten; stems benefit from a couple of minutes' head start.
- Asparagus tipsFifteen minutes reflects the long boiling times usual in period cookery, not anything the vegetable needs; the recipe itself calls for the tender part only. Modern tips are done in three to five minutes, and should still have some resistance.
- A pint of white sauceTwo cups. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour to a pint of milk makes a thin sauce; a medium one runs closer to 2 tbsp each per cup. Either way a pint is generous for four or five heads of cooked lettuce; a cup is usually enough unless you want it frankly saucy.
- StewpanA wide, straight-sided pan with a lid — a modern sauteuse or a 3-quart saucepan does the job. Width matters more than depth for driving off water from drained greens.
- Salt ratio for greensA teaspoon of salt per 2 quarts of raw greens is measured by volume of leaves, not water, and packs down to very little once cooked. Season again after chopping.
- YieldFour or five heads of lettuce cook down to about two cups, roughly four modest side servings. The recipe fixes no quantity for the beet greens beyond the salt ratio, and none at all for the asparagus, so no serving count can be given for those two.
Cooked lettuce reads oddly now, but it was ordinary kitchen economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The treatment here — boil, refresh, chop, finish in butter or a nutmeg-scented white sauce bound with egg yolks — resembles the French laitues a la creme pattern found in English and American cookbooks of the period. Household Discoveries was a general domestic compendium rather than a chef's book, and its vegetable section is characteristically brisk: three preparations run together in a single paragraph, with the long boiling times common before anyone worried much about vitamin loss or the colour of a green vegetable.