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Wilted Dandelions
Cut the roots from a quarter of a peck of young dandelions. Of course these are not fit for food after they are old enough to blossom. Wash the leaves through several cold waters, drain and shake them dry. Take a handful of leaves, cut them with a sharp knife into small pieces and put them in a saucepan. Beat one egg until light, add to it a gill of cream, stir over a fire until it thickens. Add a piece of butter the size of a walnut, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, salt and pepper to taste. Pour this over the dandelions and stir over the fire just a moment until they are wilted and tender. Serve garnished with little rolls of crisp bacon.
A hot cream-and-vinegar dressing poured over raw spring greens — essentially a stirred custard used as a salad dressing. The whole thing lives or dies on how you handle the egg.
- Never let the dressing boilEgg beaten with cream and then cooked over direct heat will scramble the moment it passes about 180F. Use low heat, stir constantly, and pull it off as soon as it coats the spoon; the vinegar goes in after thickening for the same reason.
- A quarter of a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is 2 dry quarts of loose leaves, something like nine cups measured loose and much less once packed down. It wilts down drastically and serves two to four as a side.
- A gill of creamHalf a cup. Heavy or whipping cream is right; anything lighter will thin out once the vinegar hits it.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout one tablespoon. Nineteenth-century books often size butter by comparison to nuts and eggs, the walnut falling between the smaller nut comparisons and an egg.
- "Take a handful of leaves"The instruction is loose. Cut the whole washed quantity into short ribbons and pile it in a wide pan or heatproof bowl — a handful at a time is how you chop, not how much you dress.
- Picking the greensThe book is right that leaves are only worth eating before the plant flowers; after that they turn aggressively bitter. Gather from ground you know has not been treated with herbicide or run off from a road, and soak the leaves in several changes of water, as grit clings to the crinkled edges.
- WiltingSeconds, not minutes. The greens should slump and turn glossy while still holding some structure; cooked longer they go grey and slack.
- The bacon"Little rolls of crisp bacon" most likely means thin rashers crisped and rolled, though period cooks also rolled them before cooking. Crumbled bacon does the same job, and some hot bacon dressings stir in a spoonful of the rendered fat.
Wilted dandelion with a hot sweet-sour dressing is most strongly associated with Pennsylvania German kitchens, where it appears as a spring dish eaten in the narrow window between thaw and flowering — the same seasonal logic behind the old idea of greens as a tonic after a winter of stored roots and salt meat. Taraxacum officinale is not native to North America; it travelled with European settlers as a garden and medicinal plant and then spread everywhere, which is why a cookbook can assume its reader has a free supply in the yard. The technique here, a beaten egg thickened with cream and sharpened with vinegar, is one form of hot bacon dressing; later bottled boiled dressings share the sweet-sour shape without the fresh cream.