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Lettuce (Cook onion in butter three)
Cook onion in butter three minutes. Add meat and bread crumbs, moisten with stock, and add egg yolk and seasonings. Wrap in lettuce leaves, allowing two tablespoons mixture to each portion. Tie in cheese-cloth and steam. Remove to serving dish and pour around Tomato Sauce.
This is the method half of a stuffed-lettuce entrée; the ingredient list that stood above it in the book has been separated from the text, so quantities have to be reasoned out. The proportions are the usual forcemeat ratio of the period: roughly a cup of finely chopped cooked meat to a quarter cup of soft bread crumbs, one small onion in a tablespoon of butter, one egg yolk, and stock added a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds.
- The hingeThe filling must be moist but not loose. Add stock by the spoonful only until the mixture coheres when pressed; a wet forcemeat weeps through the lettuce and the parcels collapse when untied.
- Blanch the leavesThe recipe does not mention it, but the leaves need softening before they will roll. Dip whole outer romaine or butterhead leaves in boiling water for about ten seconds, then into cold water, and pat dry. Raw leaves crack at the rib when rolled.
- "Meat"Most probably cooked meat left from a roast, chopped fine or put through a food grinder; the brief steaming and the moistening with stock both point that way. Cooked chicken, veal or lamb all work; raw ground meat would need longer steaming than the parcels want.
- Cheese-clothThe cloth holds the rolls shut while they steam. Cut squares of doubled cheesecloth, twist and tie, or skip it entirely and set the parcels seam down in a single layer so they cannot unroll.
- Steaming timeNo time is given. If the meat is already cooked, eight to ten minutes over simmering water is enough; the aim is only to set the egg yolk and heat the parcel through. Long steaming turns the lettuce grey and slack.
- Tomato SauceThe cross-reference is to a tomato sauce given elsewhere in the book; sauces of this name in the period are usually thickened with butter and flour rather than reduced. Any smooth, fairly thin tomato sauce serves, and the recipe directs that it be poured around the parcels rather than over them.
- YieldTwo tablespoons of filling per portion makes small parcels. The recipe gives no total quantity, so the number of portions depends entirely on how much mixture is made.
Stuffed lettuce belongs to the class of dishes the nineteenth century called entrées — small made dishes served between the fish and the roast, and often a way a household turned Sunday's joint into Tuesday's dinner. The technique is a scaled-down version of the French laitues farcies, where blanched lettuce is wrapped around a forcemeat and braised or steamed, and it appears in American cookbooks of the period alongside stuffed cabbage and stuffed green peppers as one more vegetable used as a casing. Recipes of this kind are full of leftover-meat entrées: a cup of chopped cold roast, a quarter cup of crumbs and an egg yolk stretched to a course for three, and the tomato sauce made it look deliberate.