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Salad Romaine
Remove the outer green leaves of two medium heads very fresh romaine. If free from sand and other elements, detach the leaves and wipe carefully without washing. If necessary to wash them, do so rapidly in cold water; drain thoroughly in a wire basket, then on a napkin. Place in a salad bowl. Season at the last moment with four tablespoons dressing. Mix it well and send to the table.
A plain dressed lettuce salad whose only difficulty is what the original leaves unsaid: which dressing, and how much lettuce two heads amounts to.
- The dressing is assumedAn undescribed salad dressing in a book of this period most often meant a French dressing: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken just before use. Four tablespoons is enough for two heads if the leaves are genuinely dry.
- Dry leaves are the hingeThe instruction to wipe rather than wash, and to drain in a basket and then on a napkin, is the whole point of the recipe. Oil will not cling to wet leaves and the water thins the vinegar into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. A salad spinner does what the wire basket and napkin did.
- "At the last moment"Dress the leaves as they go to the table. Romaine holds up better than butterhead but still collapses within ten or fifteen minutes under salt and acid.
- Two medium headsRoughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of trimmed leaves, enough for about four as a side salad. Modern romaine hearts are smaller and already stripped of the outer leaves the recipe tells you to discard, so allow three or four hearts.
- Washing is not optional nowThe advice to skip washing assumes a garden or greengrocer's head pulled that morning. Bagged and field-packed lettuce should be rinsed in cold water regardless, then dried thoroughly, which is what the original wanted anyway.
- Tearing versus cuttingThe recipe says detach the leaves, and leaving them whole or in large pieces suits the period. Tear rather than chop if you want smaller pieces.
Romaine is the cos lettuce, a long-leaved, upright type generally traced to the eastern Mediterranean; the English name is often said to point to the island of Cos, the French and American one to Rome, and both names were current in the nineteenth century. It reached American tables later than the soft butterhead lettuces and was still slightly exotic in the 1900s. The method here is the orthodox French one: choose the leaves, dry them completely, dress them last, and add nothing else. Its brevity is a mark of confidence rather than carelessness.