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Boiled Lettuce
Lettuce that has grown too old for salad may still be cooked, forming a very palatable dish. Wash four or five heads of lettuce, removing the thick bitter stalks and retaining only the sound leaves. Cook in boiling, salted water for ten or fifteen minutes; drain in a colander, pouring cold water over them. Chop and reheat with butter and seasoning or with cream sauce.
A thrift dish for bolted garden lettuce, treated much as you would spinach. It works, but the water content is the whole problem to manage.
- The hinge: squeeze it dryDraining in a colander is not enough. After the cold water, gather the leaves in your hands or a towel and press hard, or the butter and seasoning will slide off into a puddle of green water.
- TimingTen to fifteen minutes suits genuinely tough, bolted plants. Ordinary romaine or leaf lettuce is limp in two to three minutes; give it the full quarter hour and you get grey mush.
- What "too old for salad" meansLettuce past its prime, typically because it has bolted and sent up a flower stalk, turns bitter and leathery. Cooking tames the texture but not all the bitterness, and the recipe accordingly directs you to remove the "thick bitter stalks".
- Which lettucesRomaine and other cos types have the sturdiest leaves and hold up best; softer butterhead and watery iceberg cook down much further. Expect four or five heads to reduce to a surprisingly small amount of cooked greens.
- Cream sauceA thin white sauce of 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour and 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, is a reasonable amount for this much lettuce.
- Seasoning"Seasoning" here means salt and black pepper. Lemon juice or a little vinegar at the end offsets the residual bitterness better than either sugar or extra salt.
- YieldServes two to three as a side dish, and less than that if the heads are small.
Cooked lettuce reads oddly now, but it was standard practice in kitchen gardens where produce arrived all at once and had to be used before it spoiled. Lettuce that bolted in hot weather was too bitter to eat raw, so it went into the pot alongside spinach, sorrel and beet tops — French cookery has a long tradition of braised lettuce and lettuce soups for exactly this reason, and the technique here (boil, shock, chop, dress with butter or a white sauce) is the same one nineteenth-century books apply to any leafy green. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format was aimed at the home cook, and the book is full of this kind of practical salvage: what to do with the garden's mistakes rather than what to serve at a dinner party.