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Cress and Dandelion Salad
The dandelion should be fresh and young. Wash the leaves carefully, and drain well. Arrange them in a salad bowl with an equal quantity of cress. A few thin slices of onion will add much to the salad, over which should be poured a French dressing.
A two-leaf salad with no measurements at all, which is fine once you know what "French dressing" meant in 1911 and how much bitterness young dandelion actually carries.
- French dressing, as the book means itIn this period it generally means oil and vinegar seasoned with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken, often around three parts oil to one of vinegar, though printed versions of the period vary and some add mustard or paprika. What it is not is the bottled orange-red dressing sold under that name today, a later American product and wrong here.
- QuantityNo amounts are given; a few ounces of leaves in total, half dandelion and half cress, is enough to serve four as a side. Greens this light collapse under dressing, so dress at the table and toss lightly.
- Choosing dandelion"Fresh and young" is the whole recipe. Leaves cut before the plant flowers are mildly bitter; after flowering they turn harshly so and no dressing will hide it. Cultivated dandelion or Italian catalogna chicory from a market stands in well.
- If you gather it yourselfTake it only from ground you know has not been treated with herbicide or fertiliser, and away from roadsides and dog-walking routes. Wash in several changes of cold water, as the crown holds grit.
- Which cressWatercress is most likely what a reader of this book would have reached for, and gives peppery heat and body. Garden cress or upland cress works but is finer and sharper, so use a little less of it than the equal quantity specified.
- Drain well means dryDrained is not enough for a vinaigrette to cling. Spin the leaves in a salad spinner or roll them in a towel until genuinely dry, or the dressing slides to the bottom of the bowl.
- The onionSlice it paper-thin on a mandoline and use a mild red or sweet onion. Soaking the slices in cold water for ten minutes takes the raw edge off without losing the bite the recipe is after.
Dandelion greens were spring food long before they were salad-book food: the plant is one of the first things to come up in cleared ground, and eating the young leaves in March and April was a common European and later American practice, often described as a spring tonic or blood-cleanser. By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued this book, that older kitchen-garden and roadside habit was being folded into the fashionable ranks of the composed salad, dressed with oil and vinegar and served in a bowl at a proper meal. The pairing with cress is practical rather than clever: both are cool-weather greens available at the same moment, and the cress's pepper answers the dandelion's bitterness. Butterick, a pattern and magazine publisher, seems to have had in view something like a middle-class household running on one servant or none, and a salad that asks for nothing but two handfuls of leaves, an onion and a shaken dressing would have suited such a reader exactly.