Home › The World's Kitchen › Dandellon and Doucette Salad
Dandellon and Doucette Salad
Thoroughly trim and pick off all stale leaves from a pint of fresh dandelion and one pint of doucette (corn salad). Wash both well in fresh water, then thoroughly drain in a wire basket or on a cloth; place in a salad bowl, well mixed. Pour over four light tablespoons dressing. Mix well and serve.
A two-ingredient spring salad that depends entirely on the quality of the leaves and the dressing the original declines to specify.
- Doucette is mâcheSold today as corn salad, lamb's lettuce or mâche, usually in clamshell tubs of small rosettes. The name doucette is a French regional term reflecting its mildness; it is the sweet counterweight to the dandelion here, so keep the two in roughly equal proportion.
- A pint of leavesVolume, not weight: a pint of loosely packed greens weighs only an ounce or two, so the whole salad amounts to a few ounces of leaves at most. That serves two as a side, or four alongside other courses.
- Which dandelionThe leaves sold as Italian dandelion or catalogna are in fact a cultivated chicory rather than true dandelion, but they are milder and more tender and serve the same purpose. If gathering wild dandelion, take only young leaves from before the plant flowers, and only from ground you know has not been treated with herbicide or run along a roadside.
- Grit is the enemyBoth greens grow in rosettes at soil level and hold sand in the crown. Wash in a deep basin of water, lifting the leaves out rather than pouring off, and repeat until no sand settles. Mâche bruises easily, so drain it gently and do not spin it hard.
- The dressingThe recipe assumes a dressing given elsewhere in the book and specifies nothing here; a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing with salt and pepper is the obvious reading. Four tablespoons is generous for this quantity of leaves, so start with two, toss, and add more only if the leaves look dry.
- Dress at the last momentMache wilts quickly once dressed. Combine the greens in the bowl, pour the dressing just before serving, toss and serve at once.
- Balance the bitternessIf the dandelion is sharp, a little warm bacon fat in place of some of the oil, or a crumbled hard-boiled egg, is period-appropriate and tempers it without changing the character of the salad.
Dandelion has been eaten as a leaf vegetable across Europe far longer than it has been treated as a weed, and both France and Italy kept a strong tradition of gathering it in early spring, when the young rosettes are least bitter, as what was often called a tonic or blood-cleansing green. Doucette is one of several French country names for corn salad, the plant that colonises grain stubble after harvest, and the name is generally traced to doux, sweet, describing its mild flavour beside sharper field greens. Pairing the two is a straightforward peasant economy: a bitter leaf and a sweet one, both free for the picking at the same season, and neither needing anything more than oil and vinegar.