Endive Salad
Endive, French dressing.
Take the leaves when quite yellow, remove the hard parts; the leaves can be cleaned by wiping them, as it is always preferable not to wash these salads. Macerate with a French dressing.
A four-line salad that depends almost entirely on which plant you buy and how briefly it sits in the dressing. Both are worth getting right.
- Which endive is meant"Leaves quite yellow" points to blanched chicory grown in the dark: Belgian endive, sold as witloof or Belgian chicory, whose tight pale heads shade to yellow at the tips. Curly endive (frisee) and escarole also appear under the name "endive" in books of this period, and blanched frisee hearts would suit equally; the coarse green outer leaves would not.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn this era French dressing is essentially oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together; period recipes often add paprika or mustard, though not the sweetened, ketchup-based dressing the name later came to mean. Roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar is a common ratio, though period books vary; for a head or two of endive, about 3 tablespoons oil to 1 tablespoon vinegar.
- Macerate briefly"Macerate" here probably means little more than toss and let stand; no time is given. Ten minutes or so softens the leaves; much longer and they weep and go limp.
- The hard partsOn Belgian endive, cut a thin slice off the root end and dig out the dense conical core, which is the bitterest part. On curly endive, discard the tough green outer leaves and the thick central ribs.
- On not washingThe recipe gives no reason for wiping rather than washing; the usual concern was waterlogged leaves that dressing will not cling to. Belgian endive is grown covered and is usually clean, but current practice is to rinse produce and dry it thoroughly in a towel or spinner.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; two heads of Belgian endive will do for four as a side salad. Serve cold, on its own or with a few walnut halves or shreds of beet.
Blanched chicory of this kind is generally traced to mid-nineteenth-century Belgium, where growers found that chicory roots forced in darkness threw up pale, tightly furled shoots far milder than the green leaf; the Flemish name witloof means "white leaf." By the turn of the twentieth century the heads were reaching well-stocked city markets as a winter luxury, which is why a salad collection can afford a recipe that is essentially one ingredient and a vinaigrette. The insistence on wiping rather than washing belongs to the same period's conviction that a salad leaf must be bone dry, an idea that predates the salad spinner and survives in every instruction to dry greens in a cloth.