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Lettuce Salad
Choose for this the crisp center of the lettuce. Wash it, dry it well, pull to pieces or cut it into four or six sections, and arrange it in a salad-bowl. Pour over the center of the dish any dressing preferred. Mayonnaise is frequently used, but with a heavy dinner the French dressing is to be preferred to any other. Russian dressing is very much used. The following vegetables may be used instead of lettuce: endive, peppergrass, watercress, nasturtium blossoms, sorrel, dandelion, escarole, and romaine.
A method rather than a formula, from an era when the salad course was assembled at the table and the dressing did the work. The whole success rests on the lettuce being cold, dry and crisp.
- Dry it properlyWater left on the leaves thins the dressing and stops it clinging. A spinner or a clean towel, then twenty minutes uncovered in the refrigerator, gives the crispness the recipe assumes.
- The heart of the head"The crisp center" means the pale inner leaves of a firm head, such as iceberg or a butterhead type like Boston. Cutting a small head into quarters or sixths through the core, as written, still works and holds the wedge shape under dressing.
- Dress at the last momentThe recipe has the dressing poured over the center rather than tossed through. Once dressed, salted greens wilt quickly, so this is best done as it goes to the table.
- French dressing, 1920s senseFrench dressing, in the older sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled product but a plain vinaigrette — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion.
- Russian dressingIn this period it meant mayonnaise with chili sauce or ketchup, sometimes with chopped pimiento or grated onion. The origin of the name is uncertain; some early versions included caviar. It is not the same thing as the sweeter product sold under the name today.
- The substitute greensPeppergrass is garden cress; escarole and endive are both chicories (escarole broad-leaved, endive usually curly), bitter and better with a vinaigrette than with mayonnaise. Dandelion should be young leaves picked before the plant flowers, and from ground you know has not been treated.
- Nasturtium blossomsEdible, peppery, and used for color as much as flavor. Rinse and check for insects. The recipe lists them among the greens used instead of lettuce, though in practice a few flowers over leaves is more usual than a bowlful.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One good head will serve about four as a side salad.
This entry is really an instruction in restraint: one green, one dressing, nothing chopped into it. The advice to prefer French dressing "with a heavy dinner" suggests the idea that a sharp acid salad cut the richness of a long meal. The list of alternative greens is a useful record of what a household could get — much of it from the kitchen garden or the roadside rather than the market.