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Lettuce Salad
Lettuce, French dressing, chervil and tarragon if liked. Select freshly gathered and well filled lettuce heads, suppress the hard leaves, keeping only the yellow ones. Wash them in several waters, place the leaves between two towels to absorb the moisture, then place it in a salad bowl. Pour over the lettuce a French dressing, stirring it until it is properly mixed. Some chopped chervil and tarragon may be sprinkled over the salad if liked.
A plain green salad from the era when "lettuce" meant a soft butterhead and dressing was mixed at the table. Only a few details need translating.
- "Suppress the hard leaves"Suppress here is a literal borrowing of the French supprimer, meaning remove and discard. The outer green leaves of a butterhead are tougher, and the recipe simply has them taken away.
- The "yellow" leavesA well-grown Boston or Bibb head blanches pale in the centre, and those tender inner leaves are what the recipe wants. Look for butterhead or a loose-leaf head with a soft heart rather than a crisp-leaved type.
- Drying matters more than washingThe towel step is the hinge of the whole thing. Dressing slides off wet leaves and pools at the bottom of the bowl, so spin or blot until the leaves are genuinely dry.
- French dressingIn books of this period this generally means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper mixed together, with proportions varying from roughly two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweetened orange-red bottled product that later took the name in the United States.
- Dress at the last minuteAcid and salt wilt tender leaves within minutes. Toss immediately before it goes to the table, and use less dressing than you think: the leaves should glisten, not swim.
- Chervil and tarragonBoth are anise-scented and both bruise easily; chop them just before use. Fresh tarragon is far more assertive than chervil, so a teaspoon of it against a tablespoon of chervil keeps the balance.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide one good-sized head will serve three or four as a side salad.
Salads of this kind sit at the point where French restaurant practice entered the American and English household book, and the vocabulary gives it away: suppress the hard leaves, a French dressing, chervil and tarragon rather than parsley and chives. Chervil in particular was a kitchen-garden staple in France and never took firm hold in Anglophone cooking. The insistence on freshly gathered, well-filled heads is a reminder that lettuce was a seasonal crop with a short life; before refrigerated rail and ice-packed shipping made greens a year-round item, a good head of lettuce was worth the fuss of washing in several waters and drying between towels. Collections of a hundred-odd salads were a small publishing genre around the turn of the twentieth century, when salad moved from an occasional garnish to an expected course at the table.