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Lettuce Sweet Salad
6 or 8 heads of lettuce. 12 small spring onions. 1 cup of vinegar. 1/2 cup of sugar. 2 sprigs of garden mint.
Cut the lettuce small; slice in the white part of the onions with very little of the green; chop the mint. Mix all. Serve cold.
Some people say lettuce should never be washed as water spoils it, but be gathered fresh from the garden and broken into the salad bowl. That will do for the lady of a house, but will never do for hotel work. Here is a story some centuries old of a giant, that will tell why: "The story requireth that we relate what happened unto six pilgrims, who came from Sebastian near to Nantes; and who for shelter that night, being afraid of the enemy, had hid themselves in the garden upon the chicheling pease, among the cabbages and lettices. Gargantua, finding himself somewhat dry, asked whether they could get any lettice to make him a sallad; and hearing that there were the greatest and fairest in the country (for they were as great as plum trees) he would go thither himself, and brought thence in his hand what he thought good, and withal carried away the six pilgrims, who were in so great fear, they did not dare to speak nor cough. "Washing them, therefore, first at the fountain, the pilgrims said one to another softly, 'What shall we do? we are almost drowned here amongst these lettices, shall we speak? but if we speak he will kill us for spies?' As they were thus deliberating what to do, Gargantua put them with the lettice into a platter of the house as large as the huge tun of the Cistertians, which done, with oil, vinegar and salt, he eat them up, to refresh himself a lit le before supper, and had already swallowed up five of the pilgrims, the sixth being in the platter, totally hid under the lettice, except his staff that appeared, and nothing else; which Grangousier seeing, said to Gargantua, 'I think that is the horn of a shell snail, do not eat it.' 'Why not?' said Gargantua; 'they are good all this month,' which he no sooner said but drawing up the staff, and therewith taking up the pilgrim, he eat him very well, then drank a terrible draught of excellent white-wine, and expected supper to be brought up."
Nowadays we call those pilgrims insects. Moral: wash your lettuce well and look between the leaves; likewise your curled endive, or chicory.
A sweet-sour wilted lettuce salad with no oil at all — the dressing is nothing but vinegar and sugar, sharpened by onion and mint. It is best mixed shortly before serving.
- What kind of lettuceA "head" here is likely a loose-leaf, butterhead or small romaine rather than the dense iceberg of later decades, though the book does not say. Six to eight of them yields a very large bowl; two or three heads with the dressing reduced in proportion is a more realistic household batch.
- The dressing is not a vinaigretteOne cup vinegar to half a cup sugar makes a thin sweet-sour liquid, closer to a Pennsylvania Dutch wilted-lettuce dressing than to anything oiled. Cider vinegar suits it; distilled white vinegar at modern strength will be harsh unless cut with a little water.
- Dress at the last momentAcid and sugar draw water out of cut lettuce quickly, and a bowl left standing will slump and weep. Cut, chop and combine, then serve straight away.
- Spring onionsThese are scallions. Using the white and only a trace of green, as directed, keeps the onion flavour clean rather than grassy; twelve is right for a full-sized batch.
- Garden mintUsually spearmint rather than peppermint. Two sprigs means the leaves stripped and chopped fine, a tablespoon or two depending on the size of the sprigs. Peppermint's menthol would overwhelm the vinegar.
- About the washingThe long Rabelais digression is making a practical point: garden lettuce hides aphids, earwigs and grit deep in the heart. Separate the leaves, wash in a full basin of cold water so the debris sinks, then dry thoroughly — wet leaves dilute a dressing this thin.
- YieldNo quantity is given. The full recipe would serve a large table as a side, in keeping with the hotel kitchen the author refers to.
The book is addressed to hotel cooks, which explains both the scale and the aside about washing: what a home cook can do with lettuce cut minutes before dinner does not translate to a kitchen buying crates of it. The salad itself belongs to a broad nineteenth-century American family of sweet-sour lettuce dishes, sometimes said to be associated with Pennsylvania German cooking, in which sugar and vinegar stand in for oil. Of the explanations, one often given is that good salad oil was expensive or unreliable while cider vinegar was in every cellar, though the point is hard to press. The long quotation is from Sir Thomas Urquhart's seventeenth-century English translation of Rabelais's Gargantua, a book widely reprinted in Victorian editions; the author's deadpan gloss — "nowadays we call those pilgrims insects" — is the sort of joke that turns a trade manual into something a reader might actually finish.