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Dandelion Salad
Procure a quart very fresh, tender dandelions. Carefully remove the roots and stale leaves, thoroughly wash in three changes of fresh water, thoroughly drain on a cloth or wire basket and place in a salad bowl. Season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A three-line recipe that assumes two things a modern cook does not have: a supply of wild spring dandelions and a house dressing already made. Both are worth sorting out before you start.
- A quart of greensGreens were measured by volume in this period. A quart of loosely packed leaves is only a few ounces, which dresses two people as a side salad. Buy cultivated dandelion (often sold as Italian chicory) if you are not picking your own.
- Pick young, pick early"Very fresh, tender" means leaves gathered before the plant flowers. Once the yellow head appears the leaves turn aggressively bitter and fibrous, and no amount of washing or dressing will fix them.
- Where they grew mattersOnly harvest from ground you know has not been treated with herbicide or lawn feed, and stay well back from roadsides and areas where dogs run. This is the one real risk in an otherwise simple dish.
- The three watersThe repeated washing is not fussiness. Dandelion grows low and holds grit in the crown of the leaf, so lift the greens out of each bowl of water rather than pouring the water off, and change it until no sand settles.
- Dry them properlyThe cloth or wire basket is doing the work of a salad spinner. Dressing will slide off wet leaves and pool at the bottom of the bowl, which matters more with a sturdy bitter green than with lettuce.
- "Four tablespoons dressing"The book expects you to turn to its own dressing recipes. For dandelion, a sharp vinaigrette in the region of three parts oil to one part red wine vinegar, well salted, stands up to the bitterness; a spoonful of mustard helps it cling.
- Dress at the tableMix and serve, as written. Dressed dandelion loses its texture as it sits, so it should not be left standing.
- A common variationMany period versions finish the salad with hot bacon fat and its rendered pieces poured over the leaves, plus a chopped hard-boiled egg. Both are traditional partners to the bitterness if the plain version reads too austere.
Dandelion greens were early spring food across most of Europe and, by extension, across immigrant America: they came up in the yard weeks before anything was ready in the kitchen garden, and their bitterness was understood as medicinal, a tonic after a winter of salt meat and root vegetables. The name comes through French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf margin. The habit of eating them survives most visibly in the hot bacon-dressing versions of the American mid-Atlantic and in Italian cooking, where related bitter greens are still valued.