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Head Lettuce, Piquant Dressing
1 solid head lettuce 1/2 cup French dressing 1/2 teaspoon mustard 2 teaspoons grated onion dash Tobasco 1 tablespoon chow chow Cut lettuce in quarters. Add ingredients to the French dressing, and pour a portion over each serving of lettuce.
A quartered wedge salad with a spiked vinaigrette, of the type that filled the salad course in interwar menu books. The whole thing takes five minutes once the dressing is mixed.
- "French dressing" hereIn a book of this period this means a plain shaken vinaigrette -- roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, with salt and pepper -- not the sweet, tomato-tinted bottled dressing sold under that name in America today. Half a cup is about 6 tablespoons oil to 2 tablespoons vinegar.
- Which mustardHalf a teaspoon of dry mustard powder is a plausible reading, though the recipe does not specify. Prepared yellow mustard will work but is milder and adds vinegar, so cut the vinegar in the dressing slightly if you use it.
- Chow chowA sharp mixed pickle relish of cabbage, green tomato, onion and pepper in mustard or vinegar brine. Any coarse mustard pickle or a chopped bread-and-butter pickle relish stands in; drain it before measuring so the tablespoon is solids, not brine.
- The lettuce"Solid head" means a dense crisphead -- what is now sold as iceberg. Cores are usually left in on quarters to hold the wedge together; trim only the browned base. Chill the head thoroughly and dry it so the dressing clings.
- TabascoSpelled Tobasco in the original. A dash is two or three drops for the whole half cup; the pickle and mustard are already carrying heat, so taste before adding more.
- Mix, then restShake or whisk the additions into the dressing and let it stand ten minutes before serving. The grated onion and dry mustard both need a few minutes in the acid to lose their raw edge.
- Dress at the tablePour over each wedge only as it goes out; dressed crisphead softens and weeps fairly quickly. The recipe's instruction to pour a portion over each serving rather than tossing fits this, though it states no reason.
- YieldFour wedges from one head, and the half cup of dressing works out at roughly two tablespoons a wedge.
Quartered head lettuce under a doctored vinaigrette was a common fixture of American menu planning in the first half of the twentieth century, as crisphead lettuce shipped under ice from California made a firm, sliceable head widely available. The approach on show is a familiar economy: keep a jar of French dressing in the icebox and vary it with whatever is at hand -- grated onion, dry mustard, a pickle relish, a shake of the pepper sauce McIlhenny had been selling since the late 1860s. Calling the result "piquant" did real work in a menu book where the same lettuce had to reappear repeatedly without seeming to.