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Green Pepper and Escarole Salad
Cut a fat green pepper in half, remove seeds, slice exceedingly fine and place in a salad bowl. Remove outer stale leaves from a large head of escarole, detach leaves from root, wash, drain, wipe, cut leaves in two and add to green peppers. Pour in four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A two-ingredient salad that depends entirely on the knife work and on a dressing the book expects you to have already made. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions are worth thinking about.
- The dressing is assumedThe recipe calls for "four tablespoons dressing" without saying which, so the reader was expected to have a standard dressing on hand; a plain oil-and-vinegar one is the likeliest candidate. Four tablespoons is a light hand for a large head of escarole, which is probably the point, as the leaves slacken under too much dressing.
- "Exceedingly fine"This is the hinge. Raw green pepper cut thick is assertive and slightly bitter against the escarole; sliced into near-translucent slivers it reads as a seasoning rather than a second vegetable. Halve the pepper, lay each half flat, and cut across into strips no thicker than a coin.
- A "fat" green pepperA standard green bell pepper. The word here is simply descriptive: a well-filled, thick-walled specimen rather than a thin or shrivelled one.
- EscaroleStill sold under that name, sometimes as broad-leaved endive or scarole. The pale inner leaves are tender and mildly bitter; the dark outer ones are tougher and sharper. The recipe's reason for stripping them, though, is that they are stale. If your head is small, use two.
- Wash, drain, wipeEscarole is grown in sandy soil and traps grit deep in the leaf base, so the washing is not optional. The wiping matters as much: water clinging to the leaves dilutes the dressing and keeps it from coating. A salad spinner does the job the dish towel was doing.
- Dress at the tableMix and serve -- In that order and without a pause, as the recipe has it. Escarole holds up better than lettuce but still slackens once it meets vinegar.
- YieldNo yield is given. One large head with a whole pepper would plausibly serve three or four as a side salad.
Escarole belongs to the chicory family, and its place in an American cookbook labelled "The World's Kitchen" says something about who was eating it: bitter chicories were a staple of southern Italian cooking and are generally said to have arrived in American greengrocers with Italian immigration, well before they turned up in mainstream salad bowls. Pairing escarole and green peppers raw, with nothing but oil and vinegar, is a straightforwardly Mediterranean idea.