Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Baked Stuffed Lettuce
Baked Stuffed Lettuce
Pick, clean, pare and thoroughly wash half a dozen lettuce heads, parboil them for five minutes, drain thoroughly and fill the insides with sausage forcemeat. Tie each head and put them into a stewpan, laying down carefully and adding one gill of Madeira sauce and white broth. Season to taste with salt and pepper, cover with buttered paper and cook in the oven for fifteen minutes. Arrange on a hot dish, untie, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A classic French braise of stuffed lettuce, written in the compressed professional shorthand of a hotel kitchen. Two things are missing from the text — an oven temperature and any detail on the forcemeat — and one thing needs watching, which is whether the raw pork inside is actually cooked through in fifteen minutes.
- The hinge: cook the stuffing, not just the lettuceFifteen minutes will soften the lettuce long before a dense core of raw sausage meat reaches 160F. Keep the forcemeat in a thin layer inside each head rather than a fat plug, and check the centre with a thermometer before serving; extend the braise as needed.
- A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup. The text is ambiguous as to whether that is a gill of each or a gill of the two combined; either way it is a shallow braising liquid meant to come part way up the heads, not to cover them.
- Oven heatNone is given. For a covered braise of this kind a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent; the liquid should barely tremble.
- Sausage forcemeatAlmost certainly bulk pork sausage meat. A farce of this kind was often lightened with breadcrumb soaked in milk, bound with egg and seasoned with parsley or shallot, though the recipe specifies none of it. Plain bulk breakfast sausage stands in perfectly well; skip anything heavily maple-sweetened.
- Madeira sauce and white brothMadeira sauce is a brown sauce or demi-glace finished with Madeira. White broth is white stock -- veal or chicken simmered without browning. Use a good chicken stock and season at the end, since commercial stock and sausage both bring salt.
- Which lettuceLoose modern leaf lettuce collapses to nothing. Use firm cos/romaine hearts or tight butterhead; after parboiling, squeeze gently dry, open the leaves, place the forcemeat at the base and fold the head back over itself before tying with kitchen twine.
- Buttered paperA cartouche — parchment cut to fit the pan, buttered side down on the lettuce. It keeps the tops from drying without sealing in steam the way a lid would. Foil works but traps more moisture.
- YieldSix heads, so six portions as a first course or a substantial vegetable course beside roast meat.
Braised lettuce is old French kitchen practice -- laitues braisees, and stuffed, laitues farcies -- and it survived into the grand hotel repertoire. A line like "one gill of Madeira sauce and white broth" assumes a kitchen with both sauces already standing on the stove, which is why the recipe can be four sentences long.