No. 2669

Corn Salad or Lamb's Lettuce Salad

Salade de Mache ou Doucette

This salad can be mixed with monk's beard and slices of cooked beetroot. It should be well picked and all the yellow leaves removed; clean the roots, cut them off when too large, and divide the stalks into two or four parts; add cooked slices of beetroot and chopped chervil; season with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar. Monk's beard may be mixed with it, half and half.

← No. 2668 Chicory Salad Green Salads No. 2670 Dandelion Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen

A winter salad of mâche, dressed at the table in the French manner. Almost all the work is in the cleaning, which the original assumes you already know how to do.

The hinge is washingMâche grows in low rosettes in sandy soil and traps grit at the base of every clump. Trim the root end just enough to hold the rosette together, then swish in several changes of cold water and lift the leaves out rather than pouring off, so the sand stays behind. Spin or towel it thoroughly dry or the dressing will slide off.
Corn salad, mâche, doucetteAll the same plant, Valerianella locusta. "Corn salad" refers to grain fields, where it grew as a weed, not to maize. Sold in most supermarkets now as mâche or lamb's lettuce, usually pre-washed in tubs, which spares you most of the grit.
Monk's beardAmbiguous in this period. In French kitchens of Ranhofer's day barbe de capucin meant blanched wild chicory shoots, pale and bitter; the Italian barba di frate is agretti (Salsola soda), a succulent green needing a brief blanch. Either works half-and-half with the mâche; frisée or Belgian endive is the easiest stand-in for the chicory reading.
BeetrootRoast or boil whole in the skin, cool, peel and slice thin. Dress the beets separately or add them at the last moment, since their juice will stain the mâche pink within a minute or two.
ChervilDelicate anise-scented herb, still sold fresh in some markets but short-lived. Chop it just before serving; heat and standing destroy the flavor. Tarragon plus a little flat-leaf parsley is the usual substitute.
The dressingNo proportions are given in the original. The usual period ratio is roughly three parts oil to one of wine vinegar, with salt and pepper dissolved in the vinegar first. Dress immediately before serving; mache wilts faster than romaine.
YieldThe original gives no quantities. Figure 4 to 5 oz of mache and one medium beet for four as a side salad.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and this entry sits in a run of green salads numbered one after another — chicory before it, dandelion after. Mâche is a cold-weather green: it germinates in autumn, survives frost, and was for centuries gathered wild from stubble fields in France and England, which is where the English name corn salad comes from. Doucette, the alternate French name Ranhofer gives, is often read as a nod to its mildness, and the pairing with beetroot and chervil that he describes is still the standard winter salad in France. Its appearance on an American luxury menu in the 1890s reflects how thoroughly Delmonico's imported the French vegetable repertoire, greens included.