No. 720

Puree of Lettuce

Puree de Laitues

Clean and remove the greenest leaves, and use the whitest of six lettuce heads (having two pounds after this is accomplished); blanch them in boiling salted water, then drain, and press them well to extract all the liquid; put them into a saucepan with one quart of broth (No. 194a), some salt and sugar, and two ounces of bread-crumbs; let the lettuce cook, reduce the liquid entirely, then pound it in a mortar, adding one pint of veloute (No. 415), and one tablespoonful of meat glaze (No. 401). Pass all through a tammy (No. 170), heat the puree and just when prepared to serve, incorporate into it two ounces of fresh butter.

← No. 719 Puree of Lentils with Cream Garnishings No. 721 Puree of Lobster →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French vegetable purée from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, built on two of the book's mother preparations. The work is mostly in the drying-out: the lettuce must give up its water before anything else happens.

Reduce it dry, then enrichThe hinge is "reduce the liquid entirely." Wet lettuce puree tastes thin and separates, so cook it down hard before the veloute goes in. The recipe adds the butter "just when prepared to serve"; keeping the heat low or off at that point helps it stay emulsified.
The cross-referencesNo. 194 a is one of the book's numbered broths; a good unsalted chicken stock stands in. No. 415 veloute is white stock thickened with a blond roux. No. 401 meat glaze is glace de viande, stock reduced to syrup — a spoonful of demi-glace or a commercial glace concentrate works.
Two pounds means trimmed weightWeigh after discarding the dark outer leaves: the recipe wants 2 lb of pale inner leaves, which it reckons at six heads. Modern heads vary enough that you should go by the weight, not the count.
TammyA tammy (No. 170) is a woven cloth through which the purée was forced with two people twisting the ends. A food processor followed by a fine-mesh sieve or a drum sieve gives the same texture with less drama.
Bread-crumbsTwo ounces of dry white crumbs, not the coarse seasoned kind. They absorb the lettuce liquor and give the purée body; panko is too coarse unless ground finer.
Reheat gentlyOnce the velouté and glaze are in, keep the purée below a simmer. Held over direct heat it will catch on the bottom and the flour-thickened base will taste pasty.
Yield and useThe finished quantity is not given; a quart of broth reduced away plus a pint of veloute and 2 lb of pressed lettuce suggests something in the region of a quart of puree. The neighbouring entries place it among the garnishings rather than the soups.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, and its Garnishings chapter is essentially a catalogue of purées: lentil, lobster, chestnut, artichoke, each pinned to the stocks and sauces numbered elsewhere in the book. Cooked lettuce, unfamiliar to many American cooks now, was standard in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where the heads were braised whole, stuffed, or reduced to a purée like this one. The reliance on velouté and glace de viande is characteristic of the period's grande cuisine, where a vegetable purée was expected to arrive tasting of meat as much as of the vegetable, and to be smooth enough to have passed through a cloth.