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Lettuce and Cucumber Salad
Place a chapon in bottom of salad bowl. Wash, drain, and dry one head lettuce, arrange in bowl, and place between leaves one cucumber cut in thin slices. Serve with French Dressing.
A two-ingredient salad whose only real technique is the garlic crust at the bottom of the bowl. Everything else depends on the lettuce being bone dry.
- What a chapon isNot chicken. A chapon is a crust or thick slice of stale bread rubbed hard with a cut clove of garlic, sometimes moistened with oil, laid in the bowl to scent the salad. It is traditionally removed before serving, though some cooks toss it in and let whoever finds it eat it.
- Head lettuceIn the 1890s this usually meant a soft butterhead or a loose early crisphead rather than the dense iceberg of later decades. A head of Boston or Bibb gives the intended texture; romaine hearts also work.
- Drying matters more than washingWater on the leaves keeps oil from clinging and dilutes the vinegar into a puddle. Spin the lettuce dry or roll it in a towel, and dress it only at the table.
- The cucumberThe recipe asks only for thin slices. Period cucumbers were generally thicker-skinned and seedier than modern ones; with English or Persian cucumbers no peeling is needed. Salt the slices for ten minutes and blot them if you want them crisp rather than weepy.
- French Dressing in this bookFannie Farmer's French Dressing is a hand-mixed vinaigrette of oil and vinegar (roughly two parts oil to one of vinegar) with salt and pepper, worked cold, often with the bowl set in ice. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in the United States.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; one head and one cucumber would plausibly serve about four as a side salad. Dress lightly.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) treats salads as a taught category rather than an afterthought, with dressings cross-referenced, part of the book's larger project of making household cookery systematic. The lettuce-and-cucumber pairing suited early summer, when both came out of the kitchen garden at once and neither needed cooking.