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Nasturtium Salad
I HEAD LETTUCE FRESH NASTURTIUM LEAVES GREEN NASTURTIUM SEEDS, CHOPPED FRENCH DRESSING NASTURTIUM FLOWERS Add a half dozen nasturtium leaves to lettuce, add seeds to dressing, toss together and decorate with flowers.
Purslane: Have the leaves well washed and dry. Into 2 tablespoons of hot bacon fat put 2 tablespoons vinegar and a dash of pepper sauce or cayenne. Pour over the purslane and toss.
Romaine: Combine with leaves, chicory and watercress in garlic-rubbed bowl. Mince pimiento and sprinkle through; French dressing.
Spinach: Shred very young, uncooked leaves. Sprinkle with chopped mint and add French dressing.
Wild Salad: 1. Equal quantities of young dandelion, dock, wood sorrel leaves, toss with French dressing, and scatter over chopped mint, chopped chives, and chopped nasturtium buds. Garnish with wild flowers. 2. Combine young dandelion leaves, a few dock leaves tip ends of milkweed, a bit of wild onion or chives chopped up, and add bacon dressing (hot bacon fat, plus vinegar and pepper).
Watercress: (Watercress was once known as "bodily health.") Use leaves only, no stems, and mix with small young nasturtium leaves, a hard-cooked egg slice on each, then with a circle of nasturtium flowers; or, mix with shredded curled celery and French dressing; or, mix with minced green peppers, cut up scallions and French dressing; or, mix with young dandelion leaves. French dressing. (The French call dandelions "pissenlits," but they go on eating them just the same.) I HEAD LETTUCE, FINELY CHOPPED Mix all together.
The page runs one nasturtium salad and then a string of related greens, all built on the same two dressings: a plain French vinaigrette and a hot bacon-fat splash. Most of it is straightforward; the second wild salad is not.
- Raw milkweed is the problem"Tip ends of milkweed" tossed raw with bacon dressing is the one instruction on this page that cannot stand. Common milkweed contains cardiac glycosides and its latex is an irritant; foraging guides direct that the shoots be cooked, not eaten raw, and older guides call for changing the cooking water. Worse, young milkweed is easily confused with dogbane, which is genuinely poisonous. Skip that variation and consult a current, illustrated foraging reference before eating any wild green.
- Dock and wood sorrelBoth are high in oxalic acid, which is why they taste sharp. Note that the recipe calls for equal quantities; a salad made mostly of sorrel or dock is not a good idea, particularly for anyone prone to kidney stones.
- Nasturtium seedsThe green, still-soft seed pods are the part wanted. Chopped into vinaigrette they behave like capers, peppery and mustardy. Once the pods harden and pale they are too fibrous to use.
- French dressing, 1930s senseFrench dressing, older sense -- In this period the term means a simple shaken vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Anything creamy or emulsified is wrong here.
- Purslane and the hot dressingTwo tablespoons bacon fat with two tablespoons vinegar is a very sharp one-to-one ratio. Pour it over while it is still hot so the leaves wilt slightly, and taste before adding more vinegar. Purslane is succulent and holds up better to heat than lettuce would.
- DandelionOnly the small leaves from plants that have not yet flowered are worth eating raw; after the flower stalk appears they turn aggressively bitter. Take them from ground you know has not been sprayed or treated.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A head of lettuce with six nasturtium leaves and a spoonful of chopped seeds in the dressing would make a side salad for roughly four.