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Lettuce Salad
Choose for this the crisp part of the lettuce, lay it in cold water for one hour, dry well, and arrange it in a salad bowl. Pour over the center of the dish any of the dressings given in the preceding pages; mayonnaise is frequently used, but after a heavy dinner the French dressing is much to be preferred to any other. The following vegetables may be used the same as lettuce: Endive, pepper-grass, water-cress, nasturtium blossoms, sorrel, dandelion, escarolle and Romaine.
A method rather than a formula, and the only real technique in it is getting the leaves cold, crisp and bone dry before any dressing touches them.
- The hinge: dry leavesDressing will not cling to wet lettuce, and the water left behind dilutes the vinegar into nothing. After the soak, spin the leaves in a salad spinner or roll them in a towel until they squeak.
- An hour in cold waterA reviving soak of this kind makes sense for lettuce that arrived limp from a market wagon or a cellar. Bagged or refrigerated supermarket lettuce generally needs only 15-30 minutes, and heads sold in water-filled trays need none.
- "The crisp part"The pale inner heart and the firm ribs. The recipe says nothing about what to do with the looser outer leaves.
- Pour over the centerThe dressing goes in a pool at the middle rather than being worked through the leaves; the recipe leaves it there and does not say whether the salad is tossed or served as it stands. Dress immediately before serving.
- Escarolle and RomaineEscarole and romaine, both still sold under those spellings. Pepper-grass is garden cress. Sorrel and dandelion are markedly sharper than lettuce and are better mixed in than served alone.
- Nasturtium blossomsEdible and peppery, but use only flowers you know have not been sprayed. Garden-center bedding plants are treated with insecticides and are not food.
- Dressing choiceThe advice holds up: an oil-and-vinegar French dressing after a rich meal, mayonnaise when the salad is doing more of the work. Roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. As a rough modern guide, one large head of romaine or two heads of butter or leaf lettuce will dress four to six as a side salad, with about 1/4 cup of vinaigrette.
The Butterick books were published by the pattern company as part of a general household library, aimed at a middle-class housekeeper who was expected to serve courses in sequence, and the note about French dressing "after a heavy dinner" places this squarely in that world: the salad course arrived late, after the roast, as a palate-cleanser rather than a first course. The long soak in cold water is the tell of an era before refrigerated shipping and cold cases, when greens travelled uncooled and reviving them was a routine kitchen chore. The list of substitutes is also a useful record of what an American garden supplied -- pepper-grass, sorrel, dandelion and nasturtium blossoms were all things you grew or gathered rather than bought, and dandelion in particular was long treated as an early-spring green. Head lettuce of the crisp, shipping sort is generally said to have come to dominate American salads only around the middle of the century.