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Green Salads
The following recipes illustrate methods for salading greens, both wild and tame.
Buckwheat: Use only young leaves, fresh from any acquiescent farmer's field, and add French dressing. Corn-Salad: Mix with lettuce; or, mix with chopped beets or with chopped hard-cooked eggs; French dressing. Dandelion: Toss with French dressing and garnish with hard-cooked egg slices and sliced beets.
Escarole: Mix with endive leaves, add French dressing and sprinkle with minced tarragon and chervil.
Lamb's Lettuce: Toss 1/2 pound lamb's lettuce with French dressing, and add 1/2 cup broken english walnuts.
A set of short formulas rather than a single recipe, all built on the same base: clean dry leaves and a vinaigrette added at the last moment. What needs translating is mostly the vocabulary.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn books of this period French dressing is usually oil and vinegar in roughly three-to-one proportion, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine; the exact ratio varies from book to book. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in American supermarkets today.
- Corn-salad and lamb's lettuce are the same plantBoth names refer to Valerianella locusta, sold now as mâche. The book lists them separately, so read the two entries as two ways of dressing one green rather than as different ingredients.
- Dress at the tableMache and young buckwheat leaves are thin-walled and wilt quickly once they meet acid and salt. Toss immediately before serving and use a light hand.
- Dandelion timingPick or buy leaves before the plant flowers; once the plant bolts the leaves turn markedly more bitter and tough. So-called Italian dandelion (catalogna) is the usual milder market substitute, though it is a chicory rather than a true dandelion.
- Escarole and endiveBoth are chicories. Use the pale inner heart of the escarole and discard the dark outer leaves for a raw salad, or shred them fine. Tarragon and chervil are both delicate; mince them just before scattering.
- Buckwheat greensYoung buckwheat leaves are eaten as a green in several traditions but contain fagopyrin, a compound that causes light sensitivity in animals grazed heavily on the plant. Treat it as a small-quantity salad green, not a bulk vegetable.
- Foraged greensGather only from ground you know has not been sprayed, and wash in several changes of cold water.
- YieldHalf a pound of mache with a half cup of walnuts will serve about four as a side salad. The other entries give no quantities at all.
These entries belong to the long American habit of treating salad as a matter of what is at hand rather than what is in the shop, which is why wild and cultivated greens are gathered in one list. Dandelion in particular was a spring standby in German, Italian and Appalachian households alike, eaten as a tonic green when winter stores ran thin and the first bitter leaves came up before anything else. Mache, listed here twice under its two English names, is a French kitchen-garden green that was long available in America without ever becoming common, and is now generally sold under its French name. The pairing of dandelion or corn-salad with sliced beet and hard-cooked egg is a familiar older convention: the egg tempers the bitterness and the beet supplies colour to a plate that would otherwise be uniformly green.