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Lettuce in the Oven
Take several young lettuces, wash them and remove their wilted leaves, tie the tops together, and lay the lettuces side by side in a baking-pan and pour in one and one-half inches of stock. Cover the pan, and put it in a moderate oven for one-half an hour, adding stock when necessary. Place a fork under the middle of each lettuce, raise and drain, and lay them doubled up on a hot dish. Season the gravy in the pan with butter, salt, and pepper, thicken with one beaten egg, and pour it over the lettuce. Serve hot. Cucumbers "alla Toscana" Peel and blanch three or four cucumbers in boiling salted water for five minutes. Drain and cut them into pieces one inch thick and put them into a frying pan with one ounce of butter, a little flour, and one-half pint of veal broth, stir well, and add some salt and pepper. Reduce for about fifteen minutes, stirring until it boils, add one teaspoon of chopped parsley, one-half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg, one-half a cup of cream, and the beaten-up yolks of two eggs. Put on the fire again for three or four minutes. Do not let boil, and serve hot.
Cauliflower "in Stufato" Remove the outer leaves and clean a fine cauliflower. Cut it into several pieces and wash them well with cold water, put them into a pot of boiling salted water, and cook quickly for twenty or thirty minutes, until they are quite tender. Take them out without breaking, and place them on pieces of buttered toast, then put some butter in a frying-pan, add a little flour mixed with some stock, stir well until it boils, then add several finely chopped mushrooms, and cook a little more. Take it off the fire, and add the yolks of two eggs which have been well beaten, salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, and the juice of one lemon. Pour this sauce over and round the cauliflower, and serve. The sauce must not be boiled after adding the eggs.
Three vegetable dishes in one entry, all finished with the same trick: a broth-based sauce enriched and thickened with egg. The egg is the hinge in every case.
- Never boil the egg-thickened sauceIn all three dishes the beaten egg or yolks go in off the heat or over the gentlest flame. Above about 180F the yolk sets into curds and the sauce breaks. Warm it just until it coats a spoon, then stop.
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350F; period usage for 'moderate' runs somewhere around 350-375F. The lettuces are braising, not roasting, so the covered pan keeps them from drying while the stock reduces.
- Which lettuce"Young lettuces" is probably best read as firm cos or romaine hearts, or the small Little Gem type; loose-leaf and butterhead varieties collapse in half an hour of braising. Tying the tops holds each head together for lifting out whole.
- Stock depth and quantityAn inch and a half in a shallow baking pan is a good deal of liquid, deliberately so, since it reduces into the sauce. Top up only if the pan threatens to run dry.
- Half a pint of veal brothOne cup in US measure; about 10 fluid ounces, a little more, if the book is following British measure. Veal broth is rarely sold; a light unsalted chicken stock is the nearest substitute and will not fight the nutmeg and cream.
- Cauliflower timingTwenty to thirty minutes in boiling water is a Victorian-era length that yields grey, sulphurous florets. Cut into large pieces, eight to twelve minutes gets them tender enough to lift out whole without breaking.
- CucumbersUse firm ridge or Persian cucumbers and seed them if the seed cavity is watery; a modern greenhouse cucumber will go slack. Five minutes blanching plus fifteen minutes reducing is a long cook, so cut the pieces a full inch thick as directed.
- YieldEach of the three serves four as a side. The lettuce and the cauliflower both want to be plated and sauced at the last minute, since the egg sauces do not hold or reheat.
Braised lettuce reads oddly to cooks who know lettuce only as salad, but it survived on Italian and French tables well into the twentieth century as lattuga brasata or laitues braisées. All three dishes here belong to the borrowed-French register of Italian cooking as it was presented to English-speaking readers around 1900: veal broth, a butter-and-flour liaison, egg yolks, nutmeg, a squeeze of lemon. That vocabulary was the polite international kitchen of the period, and books of "simple Italian cookery" aimed at British and American households leaned on it heavily, since it reassured a reader who might otherwise be nervous of a foreign vegetable course. The tag in stufato simply means stewed or braised, and alla Toscana here signals nothing more precise than a regional flourish attached to a sauce that would be at home anywhere on the peninsula.