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Cream of Lettuce
Follow the recipe for cream of spinach, substituting one head of lettuce for the quart of spinach.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the cream of spinach recipe in front of you. The standard early twentieth-century cream soup behind it is a thin white sauce — roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a quart of milk — thinned and flavoured with the cooked, sieved vegetable.
- The substitution is not equal by weightA quart of spinach leaves, loosely packed, cooks down to very little, while one head of lettuce is a much larger raw volume; the recipe assumes the two are interchangeable in effect rather than in measure. A soft-leaved type — butterhead or a large romaine — will give more flavour than a compact iceberg.
- Cook the lettuce brieflyLettuce needs only two or three minutes of wilting in a little butter or stock. Spinach timings applied to lettuce push it into a dull, grey, flat-tasting purée.
- Sieve or blendThe period method is to press the cooked vegetable through a sieve. A blender does it in seconds, but lettuce ribs are stringy; strain after blending if you want the smooth texture the recipe intends.
- BitternessOuter leaves and the core of a bolted head turn bitter when cooked. Discard the coarsest outer leaves and trim the stem end, and taste before you add the last of the milk.
- Do not boil after the purée goes inOnce the green purée meets the hot milk, keep it below a simmer. Boiling dulls the colour to olive and encourages the milk to catch on the pan bottom.
- SeasoningLettuce is far milder than spinach, so this wants more help: salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, and a spoonful of the cooking liquid or a little chicken stock in place of some of the milk.
Cream soups built on a flour-and-milk base were the backbone of American home-cookery instruction from the 1880s onward, and the printed recipes of the era are frankly modular: one white sauce, one method, a long list of vegetables to run through it. Loose-leaf books like Mrs. Fryer's share that structure, the cross-reference standing in for a repeated page of instruction. Cream of lettuce fits the pattern, though the French had long treated lettuce as a cooked vegetable in soups and braises and the idea likely reached American cookbooks through that route.