Kale Salad
Kale, French dressing, cresses.
Take the inside leaves from the kale, place in a salad bowl, and pour over the whole a French dressing. Garnish with cresses.
Three lines and two ingredients, which means the whole dish rests on the leaves you choose and the dressing you make. Both need translating.
- "French dressing" is not the bottled kindIn a book of this period it means a simple vinaigrette whisked to order: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, with salt and pepper, sometimes a little mustard. The sweet orange emulsion sold under that name in American supermarkets is a later and unrelated product.
- The inside leaves are the pointThe instruction to take only the inner leaves is doing the work of a whole paragraph. The pale, tightly furled centre of the head is thinner and far less bitter than the outer leaves, which at this size are tough enough to need cooking. Discard or save the outer leaves for a braise.
- Strip the ribsEven inner leaves of curly or Tuscan kale carry a woody midrib. Fold each leaf and cut or tear the leaf away from the stem, then shred crosswise into ribbons narrower than a pencil.
- Dress it early, not at the last minuteUnlike lettuce, kale improves for sitting in acid and oil. Twenty to thirty minutes in the dressing, worked briefly between the hands, softens the leaf noticeably. The original says nothing about timing.
- "Cresses"Watercress in most cases, or garden cress (peppergrass), which can be grown on a windowsill. Either gives the peppery contrast the dish is built around; upland cress or young mustard greens do the same job.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. A large head of kale yields perhaps 4 cups of shredded inner leaf, enough for four as a side salad, and will take about 1/4 cup of dressing before it slicks rather than coats.
- Worth addingThe recipe is deliberately bare, but it takes well to what the period would have called garnishes: shaved hard cheese, toasted nuts, a little grated onion in the dressing.
Kale is one of the oldest cultivated brassicas in Europe and for most of its history was a boiling green, cheap, frost-hardy and associated with poor and northern kitchens rather than with the salad bowl. Its appearance raw in an American salad collection of the early twentieth century reflects a broader fashion of that moment for uncooked vegetables, driven partly by new nutritional enthusiasm for "green food" and partly by the salad course's rise as a marker of a well-set table. Note how carefully the recipe hedges: only the inside leaves, and only with cress alongside to lift them.