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Wilted Lettuce
Place in a vegetable dish lettuce that has been very carefully picked and washed each leaf by itself, to remove all insects. Cut across the dish four or five times, and sprinkle with salt. Fry a small piece of fat ham until brown, cut it in small pieces; when very hot add cup of good vinegar, and pour it boiling hot over the lettuce; mix it well with a fork, and garnish with slices of hardboiled eggs. Be certain to have the fat so hot that when vinegar is poured in, it will boil immediately. Add half a cup or a cup of vinegar according to strength of vinegar and quantity of lettuce.
A hot bacon dressing poured over leaf lettuce, and the whole thing lives or dies on the temperature of the fat. Everything else is adjustable.
- The hingeThe fat must be hot enough that the vinegar boils the instant it hits the pan. If it only steams, the dressing cools before it reaches the bowl and the lettuce sits limp and greasy rather than wilted and glossy. Have the lettuce salted and waiting on the table before the vinegar goes in.
- Fat hamThis means the fatty end or trimmings of a salt-cured country ham, not a slice of modern pink deli ham. Thick-cut bacon or salt pork gives the closest result; the recipe asks only for a small piece, so expect a couple of tablespoons of rendered fat at most.
- The lettuceLoose-leaf garden lettuce is the likeliest sort meant, though the recipe says only 'lettuce'. Romaine hearts work. Iceberg does not wilt so much as collapse into water, and hydroponic butter lettuce is too tender to stand up to boiling vinegar.
- VinegarThe recipe itself tells you to judge 'according to strength of vinegar and quantity of lettuce', which is why it hedges between half a cup and a cup. Modern cider vinegar at 5 percent may well be sharper than what was meant; start with a third of a cup for a large bowl and add more off the heat. A pinch of sugar in the pan is a variation found in some regional versions and takes the edge off.
- SaltingThe ham fat and the cure carry a good deal of salt already. Sprinkle the leaves lightly, taste after tossing, and finish with pepper.
- WashingThe instruction to wash each leaf by itself is aimed, as the recipe says, at removing insects from garden lettuce. The practical point survives: dry the leaves thoroughly, since water on the leaves dilutes the dressing and drops the temperature.
- Yield and timingA head of leaf lettuce with this dressing will serve about four as a side. Toss and serve immediately; wilted lettuce does not hold, and within ten minutes it is a bowl of warm salad water.
Wilted lettuce belongs to a family of hot-bacon-dressing salads found across the Upland South, the Midwest and Pennsylvania German kitchens, where it is variously called killed lettuce, wilted salad or Speck salat. The technique is thrift on both ends: it uses the rendered fat and browned scraps of cured pork that a pork-keeping household had to hand, and it makes edible the thin, slightly bitter early-spring leaf lettuce that comes out of the garden before anything else is ready.