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Braised Lettuce
Remove stale leaves from six very small heads fresh lettuce, plunge in boiling water five minutes. Take up with a skimmer, drop in cold water for a few minutes, drain and press out all the water.
Place in a sautoire a few trimmings of larding pork, then place lettuce over, add four branches parsley and two medium onions with two cloves stuck in. Season with teaspoon salt. Cover lettuce with slices of larding pork, moisten with half gill white wine, a gill broth and half gill pure tomato juice. Cover pan and set in oven thirty minutes. Remove, lift up lettuce, place on a sieve, lightly squeeze and give nice forms. Dress on a hot vegetable dish, crown-like, with six heart-shaped croutons alternately. Skim fat from gravy, press through a Chinese strainer into a saucepan, boil five minutes. Mix on a plate a teaspoon butter with teaspoon flour, mix well, add it to sauce and sharply mix. Pour sauce over the lettuce and serve.
A French garnish dish translated into an American book: lettuce blanched, braised under pork fat, and served with its own reduced gravy. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the words and vessels have moved on.
- Choose the right lettuceThis wants firm, tightly furled hearts, or the inner hearts of romaine. Modern loose-leaf and butterhead varieties collapse to nothing after five minutes in boiling water, and iceberg turns watery and bitter. Six small heads serves six as a side.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan wide enough to hold the heads in one layer, with a lid. Any lidded braiser or heavy skillet works; the point is that the liquid should come partway up the lettuce, not swim it.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 4 tablespoons, a gill of broth is half a cup, and half a gill of tomato juice is another 4 tablespoons. That is roughly a cup of liquid in total for six heads.
- Larding porkUnsmoked pork fatback or a slab of fresh side pork. Salt pork will do if you rinse it and cut the added teaspoon of salt; smoked bacon changes the dish entirely, since the flavour here is meant to be fat and sweetness rather than smoke.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the reader was expected to judge the oven. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the thirty minutes the recipe allows for small blanched heads; larger heads will need longer.
- Squeeze, then shapeThe hinge of the dish. Blanched lettuce holds an astonishing amount of water, and if you skip the pressing after both the blanch and the braise the sauce will thin out on the plate. Press gently on a sieve and fold each head into a neat parcel before dressing it.
- Chinese strainerA chinois is the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve, or a coarse one lined with a single layer of cheesecloth, gives the same result.
- Butter and flourThis is beurre manie, raw butter and flour worked to a paste and stirred into the hot gravy. Add it in small pieces and keep it moving, or you get flour lumps in what should be a glossy, barely thickened sauce.
- CroutonsBread cut into hearts and fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp on both sides. Cut and fry them at the last minute; they soften quickly once the sauce goes on.
Braised lettuce belongs to the French repertoire of laitues braisées, a garnish more often seen beside veal or lamb than standing alone, and its logic is the logic of the kitchen garden: lettuce bolts and toughens fast in warm weather, and braising rescues heads that have grown too coarse to eat raw. The method here — blanch, refresh in cold water, press dry, then braise between layers of pork fat with an onion stuck with cloves — is standard nineteenth-century professional practice, and the vocabulary gives away the source: sautoire, Chinese strainer, croutons cut in hearts — the language of hotel and restaurant kitchens carried over into an American book. Cooked lettuce reads as odd now, but it was ordinary enough that the recipe assumes no explanation is needed.