Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Head Lettuce, Chiffonade Dressing
Head Lettuce, Chiffonade Dressing
1 solid head lettuce, quartered 1/2 cup French dressing 1 teaspoon each grated onion and diced green pepper 1 tablespoon minced red pepper 1 chopped hard cooked egg Mix ingredients with French dressing, serve over the cleaned and crisped lettuce, very cold.
A vinaigrette carrying chopped egg and minced vegetables, spooned over wedges of crisphead lettuce. The whole thing depends on the lettuce being genuinely cold and dry when the dressing hits it.
- French dressingIn a book of this vintage this means a plain vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, shaken to combine. It is not the sweetened orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Head lettuceMost likely crisphead lettuce, what a supermarket now labels iceberg; the word 'solid' points that way, though period books also used 'head lettuce' for other heading types. Crisphead holds its shape best when quartered under a dressing; romaine hearts are a workable substitute.
- Red pepperA tablespoon of minced red pepper here means sweet red pepper or drained canned pimiento, not chile or cayenne.
- Grated onionGrate on the fine side of a box grater and use the juice that comes with it. That pulp dissolves into the dressing, where minced onion would sit on top of it in lumps.
- Crisping the lettuceWash the quarters, then chill them wrapped in a towel for at least an hour. Any surface water left on the leaves will thin the vinaigrette and slide it off onto the plate.
- TimingMix the dressing ahead if you like, but dress the lettuce close to serving. Cut lettuce wedges soon wilt and weep once coated in acid and salt.
- YieldOne head quartered gives four servings, and the half cup of dressing is about two tablespoons per wedge.
Chiffonade is French for something cut into rags or ribbons, and in professional kitchens it describes leaves shredded fine; applied to a salad dressing in American hotel and restaurant cookery it came to mean a vinaigrette loaded with finely chopped garnish, often hard-cooked egg with beet, pepper or onion. Chiffonade dressing appears on hotel and restaurant dressing lists of the period alongside French, Thousand Island and Roquefort, and a quartered head of crisphead lettuce was a common salad course in American home cookery of these decades. The pairing has a clear descendant in the modern steakhouse wedge salad, where a cold quarter of iceberg carries a dressing usually built on blue cheese and bacon rather than egg and pimiento.