No. 2672

Lettuce Salad, Plain

Salade de Laitue, Simple

Choose freshly gathered and well-filled lettuce heads, suppress the hard leaves, keeping only the yellow ones; pick them off the stalks, retaining the heart whole, the size of an egg, and cut it in four. Split each leaf through the center, wash them at once, drain, wipe and shake the salad well to extract all the water, then place it in a salad bowl, sprinkling over some chopped chervil and tarragon. Put into a bottle four egg-yolks, two spoonfuls of vinegar and eight of oil, some salt and pepper; shake the seasoning up well in the bottle, and pour it over the lettuce, stirring it until it is properly mixed.

← No. 2671 Escarole and Endive Salad Green Salads No. 2673 Lettuce and Anchovy Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A plain green salad from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, but the dressing is four raw egg yolks shaken with oil and vinegar and served without any cooking step. That is the part that no longer stands.

The raw yolks are the problemFour uncooked egg yolks are the body of this dressing, and nothing in the method heats them. Shell eggs are the classic vehicle for Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean egg; acid at this dilution neither kills it nor prevents growth. A current recipe should be used for any yolk-based dressing.
Held at room temperatureThe dressing is mixed in a bottle, poured over leaves and tossed, with no refrigeration implied. A yolk emulsion sitting warm on salad is exactly the condition in which a small initial contamination becomes a large dose.
"Spoonfuls" are not a measurementRanhofer's two spoonfuls of vinegar to eight of oil sets the ratio at 1:4, but the size of the spoon is nowhere specified in the recipe. Take the proportion as the instruction rather than the volume.
What "suppress the hard leaves" meansDiscard the tough dark outer leaves entirely and keep only the pale inner ones, a much more ruthless trim than modern practice. The heart is retained whole, about the size of an egg, and cut in four; the recipe does not say which variety of lettuce is intended.
Drying matters more than it soundsWashing, draining, wiping and then shaking the leaves is not padding: any surface water thins the dressing and keeps it from clinging. A salad spinner does the same job the towel and shaking did.
Chervil and tarragonThe fines herbes pairing here is deliberate and mild — chervil is faintly anise-like and fades fast, so it wants to be fresh and added at the last moment. Dried chervil contributes essentially nothing.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield and does not say how many heads to use; only that they be freshly gathered and well filled.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full account of a grand restaurant kitchen, and the salad entries nearby run to escarole and endive and to lettuce with anchovy. The dressing here is not a mayonnaise but an older sort of yolk-thickened vinaigrette, shaken rather than whisked. That the recipe specifies keeping only the yellow inner leaves says something about the period's taste as well: nineteenth-century American and French cooking prized blanched, pale, tender salad greens, and gardeners tied or covered lettuce heads to keep the hearts from greening. The preference for dark, bitter leaves is a twentieth-century reversal.