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Lettuce Salad
Choose the crisp, centre leaves of a head of lettuce; do not wash unless it is necessary. If, however, obliged to do so, do not break or separate the leaves from the head. Put it in a wire basket, and plunge in and out of a pan of cold water. Shake and dry each leaf carefully on a soft towel. Arrange neatly on a salad bowl and send with it to table a bowl of French dressing.
While it is customary in this country to serve Mayonnaise with lettuce, it is certainly a mistake. The simple French dressing is more appropriate and refreshing.
The following may be arranged and served the same :- Endive, Sorrel, Water-cress, Pepper grass, Nasturtium blossom, Turnip tops, Dandelions, Corn-salad.
This is an assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the technique is all in the handling of the leaves. Two of the original instructions run against current practice.
- Wash the greens anywayThe advice to skip washing dates from a time when a garden head went straight from soil to bowl. Commercially grown and bagged greens should always be washed in cold water, both for grit and because leafy greens are a recognised route for foodborne illness.
- Keep the head intactThe point of plunging the whole head rather than loose leaves still holds: cut edges take up water and bruise. Trim the base, dunk, then separate.
- Drying matters more than anythingDressing will not cling to a wet leaf, and the water dilutes the vinegar. A salad spinner is far quicker than drying each leaf on a soft towel; a spell uncovered in the fridge crisps the leaves further.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. It means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, mixed fresh.
- Dress at the tableSending the dressing separately is deliberate, not fussiness. Acid and salt begin collapsing tender lettuce within minutes, so lettuce dressed in the kitchen arrives limp.
- The alternative greensPepper grass is garden cress; corn-salad is mache; endive here means curly endive or Belgian chicory depending on market. Sorrel and dandelion are aggressively sour and bitter and are better mixed into milder leaves than served alone.
- Turnip tops are the outlierUnlike the rest of the list, turnip greens are tough and hairy raw unless picked very young. They are more often blanched briefly and dressed warm than eaten raw.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Using only the crisp heart as directed, one large head will serve about two as a side. Reserve the outer leaves for soup or braising rather than discarding them.
The insistence that mayonnaise on lettuce is "certainly a mistake" is a period argument, not a neutral note. American tables of the late nineteenth century leaned heavily on thick boiled and mayonnaise dressings, partly because a rich dressing read as hospitality; the domestic-science writers and cooking-school teachers who produced books like this one campaigned steadily for the lighter French style, which they associated with continental refinement and with letting a vegetable taste of itself. The long list of substitute greens is equally revealing: cress, sorrel, dandelion, corn-salad and nasturtium blossom were kitchen-garden and even dooryard plants, gathered rather than bought, in an era before year-round shipped lettuce made a single species the default salad. Serving the dressing in a separate bowl was among the practices recommended at the time, and dressing on the side is still offered in restaurants today.