Home › The World's Kitchen › Dandelion Salad with Eggs
Dandelion Salad with Eggs
Carefully pick off all stale leaves from a quart very fresh, white dandelion and neatly pare the roots. Thoroughly wash in three different changes of fresh water. Carefully drain in a wire basket or on a dry cloth, then place in a salad bowl. Season with four tablespoons dressing. Mix well; just a minute before serving finely mince two cold hard-boiled eggs, lightly sprinkle them all over the dandelion; gently mix again, see that the eggs are thoroughly mixed in and serve.
A plain vinaigrette salad of raw dandelion greens, of the kind eaten across France, Italy and the German-speaking countries in early spring. Two details carry the dish: the greens must be young and pale, and they must be bone dry before the dressing goes on.
- "White dandelion"This most likely means blanched greens: either the pale inner crown of a young plant dug before it flowers, or plants deliberately covered to keep out light. Green, mature, post-flowering leaves are markedly more bitter and will not suit this salad. Cultivated dandelion sold in spring is the nearest substitute; chicories such as catalogna or puntarelle are a different plant but can stand in.
- A quart of greensLoose leaves measured by volume, roughly 4 to 5 ounces packed, which dresses three to four people as a side salad. Buying by weight, start at 5 oz untrimmed.
- "Pare the roots"Probably not the long taproot, which is tough and fibrous raw. The instruction most likely refers to trimming and scraping the short pale crown where the leaves join, which is the tenderest part.
- Four tablespoons dressingPresumably the plain French dressing standard for the period, on the order of three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper; the book's own proportions are not given here. Four tablespoons for a quart of leaves is a light coating rather than a soaking, which suits a bitter green.
- Dry them properlyThree changes of water matter because dandelion holds grit in the leaf base. The wire basket is a salad basket, swung to throw off the water and the forerunner of the modern spinner; any water left clinging thins the dressing and the leaves go slack.
- Eggs at the last minuteMinced hard-boiled egg absorbs dressing and turns pasty if it sits. Add it a minute before serving as written, and mix gently so the yolk coats the leaves rather than collapsing into paste at the bottom of the bowl.
- If you forageTake only from ground you know has not been sprayed, treated with lawn chemicals or used by dogs, and stay well back from roadsides. Pick before the flower stalk appears; after that the leaves are too bitter for a raw salad.
- Worth addingThe period versions of this salad in France and Alsace commonly finished with hot bacon fat and lardons poured over the leaves, or a little mustard in the dressing. Either tames the bitterness if your greens are stronger than you expected.
Dandelion salad is often said to be among the oldest surviving spring tonics in European cooking - the first green thing available after winter, and eaten as much for its supposed cleansing effect on the blood and liver as for its taste. The plant's French name, pissenlit, records its long-standing reputation as a diuretic bluntly enough; the English name is generally traced to dent de lion, for the toothed leaf. In the German and Alsatian tradition the salad is dressed warm with bacon fat, in Italy the greens go into misticanza, and in Pennsylvania German households dandelion with a hot sweet-sour dressing was a fixed Easter-season dish. Its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book reflects the early twentieth-century American interest in the peasant food of immigrant communities - and a period when dandelion was still sold in city markets rather than treated as a weed.