Lentils
For a garnish or as an entremet to be cooked as haricots. For soup it is made as pea-soup and called Chantilly, but by rights it should be called after Esau, who loved it well and sold his birthright for it.
LETTUCE is not much cooked in England, and when cooked is not much better than a cabbage; but when raw, and eaten in salad, it has a peculiarly pleasant taste, and has a sedative action upon the nervous system which makes one return to it eagerly, as one returns to tobacco and to opium. The chemists obtain from the lettuce an inspissated juice-called sometimes lactucarium, sometimes lettuceopium-which is said to allay pain, to slacken the pulse, to reduce animal heat, and to conduce to sleep. When Adonis died, it is reported that Venus threw herself on a lettuce-bed to lull her grief and cool her desires.
The lettuce is known at our tables in two leading varieties the cabbage and the Cos lettuce. What Cos means is not very clear : it is supposed to be equivalent to the first syllables of gooseberry and horseradish, which are to be identified with gross, and mean big. The French Ling know this lettuce as the Roman, and there are two accounts of its introduction into France. One is that it came with the Pope to Avignon; the other that Rabelais admired it mightily on his visit to Rome, and brought it back with him to his native land. When the French make a salad of either lettuce, they usually add to it, by way of garniture, a chopped ravigote.
For the mode of cooking lettuce, see the French way of cooking cabbage; or under the name of Peasant, see the Flemish way of preparing it with peas.