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Lettuce Salad
Choose for this the crisp center of the lettuce. Wash it, dry it well, pull to pieces or cut it into four or six sections, and arrange it in a salad-bowl. Pour over the center of the dish any dressing preferred. Mayonnaise is frequently used, but with a heavy dinner the French dressing is to be preferred to any other. Russian dressing is very much used.
The following vegetables may be used instead of lettuce: endive, peppergrass, watercress, nasturtium blossoms, sorrel, dandelion, escarole, and romaine.
A method rather than a formula: the instruction that matters is drying the leaves, since dressing slides off wet lettuce and pools at the bottom of the bowl.
- Dry thoroughlyA salad spinner does in seconds what the book asks for when it says to dry the lettuce well. Any water clinging to the leaves dilutes the dressing and keeps oil from coating them.
- Dress at the tableDressing poured, not tossed -- The recipe pours dressing over the arranged wedges rather than tossing them. Dressed lettuce collapses within minutes, so combine only when the bowl is going out.
- French dressing, 1900 senseAt this date the term generally meant oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar; this page itself gives no proportions. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in America.
- Russian dressingAt this date, mayonnaise thinned with chili sauce or tomato catsup, sometimes with chopped pimiento; in fancier houses a spoonful of caviar. Nothing to do with the modern rye-sandwich condiment beyond ancestry.
- PeppergrassGarden cress, sold now as cress or sometimes as "pepper cress." Sharp and peppery, best used as part of a mixture rather than alone.
- Nasturtium blossomsEdible and mildly hot, but only from plants grown without pesticide treatment. Ornamental nursery stock is not food.
- Sorrel and dandelionBoth are aggressively sour or bitter compared with lettuce, and both are best young. Older dandelion leaves in quantity want blanching or a hot bacon-fat dressing rather than a cold vinaigrette.
- YieldThe recipe divides the crisp heart into four or six sections, so one large head gives roughly four to six modest side servings. The discarded outer leaves are worth keeping for soup or braising.
Serving a lettuce heart in wedges with dressing poured over the middle was the standard American "plain salad" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is often said to lie behind the wedge salad still found on steakhouse menus. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the practical middle-class household, gives the reader a template rather than a dish: one technique, three dressings, and a list of substitute greens. That list is worth reading closely. Peppergrass, sorrel, dandelion and nasturtium were kitchen-garden plants a home cook could pick. Salad greens in this period were seasonal and local, and the crisp heart the recipe insists on reflects a taste that crisphead lettuce would go on to satisfy.