Home › Vegetables › Dutch Lettuce
Dutch Lettuce
Wash carefully two cabbage lettuces, separate the leaves and tear each leaf into about three pieces. Cut a quarter of a pound of ham or bacon into dice and fry until brown; while hot add two tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Beat one egg until light, add two tablespoonfuls of sour cream and stir into the ham. Stir this over a fire until it thickens and pour it while hot over the lettuce. Mix carefully with a fork and serve immediately.
A hot bacon dressing thickened with egg, poured over lettuce at the last moment. The whole dish stands or falls on the dressing not scrambling.
- The hinge: keep the heat lowTwo tablespoons of cream and one egg will curdle in seconds over direct heat. Pull the pan off the burner before the egg goes in, stir constantly over the lowest possible flame, and stop the moment it coats the spoon — it should look like thin custard, not curds.
- "Cabbage lettuce"A heading lettuce rather than a loose-leaf type; a butterhead such as Boston or Bibb fits, though the term also covered firmer heading sorts. Two heads give roughly 8 cups of torn leaves; romaine hearts also hold up well under hot dressing.
- Ham or baconA quarter pound is about 4 ounces, cut into small dice. Modern supermarket bacon is often wetter and leaner than the cured pork this recipe assumes, so render it slowly and expect less fat in the pan.
- Sour creamPeriod sour cream was naturally soured cream rather than a cultured commercial product, and its thickness and tang varied. Commercial sour cream works; crème fraîche is higher in fat and less likely to break.
- VinegarCider vinegar of the period was not standardized and could be weaker or stronger than the 5 percent product on the shelf now. Add one tablespoon first, taste the finished dressing, and adjust.
- Serve immediately means immediatelyHot dressing wilts the leaves as it hits them and the salad slumps quickly. Have the lettuce dried, torn and waiting before the dressing goes on the fire.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two heads of lettuce with this quantity of dressing will serve about four as a side salad.
Hot bacon-and-vinegar dressings poured over greens run through the cooking of German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, where the same treatment is better known applied to potatoes or dandelion greens. "Dutch" here is the familiar English rendering of Deutsch rather than any connection to the Netherlands, and versions of this salad appear in American cookbooks of the period under names like wilted lettuce or killed lettuce — the leaves being "killed" by the hot fat. The dressing belongs to the family of cooked or boiled dressings, widely used in American kitchens before bottled mayonnaise became generally available.