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Stuffed Lettuce
Clip off the stalks and pick off the stale leaves from six very small, sound heads of lettuce, plunge them in two quarts boiling water with teaspoon salt and boil five minutes. Lift up with a skimmer and let cool off in cold water, then carefully press out all the water. Split them in two. Skin three country sausages, place the meat on a plate, add a little chopped parsley and three chopped canned mushrooms, mix well. Divide the force in the lettuce, give their former shape, then tie them around with a string. Place in a sautoire half a sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, one branch parsley , one bay-leaf and one clove, place the lettuce over them. Season with a light teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Arrange a thin slice of pork on top of each lettuce, then moisten with two gills broth, two tablespoons sherry and one gill demiglace. Boil five minutes, set in the oven forty minutes. Remove, untie, dress on a hot dish, skim fat from the surface of gravy and let the gravy reduce eight minutes on the range, then strain through a Chinese strainer over the lettuce, arrange six heart shape bread croutons around and serve.
A French braise of stuffed lettuce dressed up for an American kitchen. Nothing here is difficult, but half the vocabulary is professional French of about 1900.
- The lettuce to buy"Very small, sound heads" means something with a dense heart that will survive blanching and forty minutes of braising — Little Gem, Bibb, or trimmed romaine hearts. Iceberg collapses into water and modern loose-leaf lettuce will not hold a shape at all.
- MeasuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of broth is one cup and one gill of demi-glace is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper — assertive but not a misprint.
- Sautoire and Chinese strainerA sautoire is a straight-sided sauté pan with a lid; any wide braising pan will do, so long as the heads sit in one layer. A Chinese strainer is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer — a fine sieve gives the same result.
- Oven heatThe recipe says only 'set in the oven' and gives no temperature or oven description at all. A moderate oven — around 350F — is a reasonable modern reading; the liquid should barely tremble rather than boil, or the leaves shred.
- Country sausagesThese are fresh, uncooked, coarsely ground pork sausages in casings, which is why you are told to skin them. Bulk breakfast sausage or plain fresh pork sausagemeat will stand in; roughly half a pound is a fair guess at three links, though the recipe gives no weight.
- The thin slice of porkThis acts as barding, laid on to baste the lettuce as it renders. The recipe does not say which cut; a fatty slice — fatback, unsmoked belly or pancetta — suits the purpose, while streaky bacon brings smoke the dish was not designed for.
- Demi-glaceA professional kitchen of this period would typically have had some standing by. A commercial demi-glace concentrate or half a cup of well-reduced brown veal or beef stock is the practical answer; without something gelatinous the finished gravy will not coat.
- Squeeze hardThe hinge of the dish. If the blanched heads are not pressed genuinely dry, the stuffing will not adhere, the string will slip, and the braising liquid dilutes into something that refuses to reduce.
- YieldSix stuffed heads, one per person as a first course or light lunch, with the croutons standing in for any other starch.
Braised lettuce — laitues braisées, and stuffed, laitues farcies — was a staple of the French repertoire long before it reached American cookbooks, a way of treating a salad green as a vegetable to be cooked in stock with carrot, onion and a bouquet. The method here is straight classical practice: blanch, refresh, press, stuff, bard, braise on a bed of aromatics, then reduce and strain the cooking liquor into a sauce. The instructions read as a restaurant cook's, assuming a pot of demi-glace on the stove and a chinois within reach. Heart-shaped croutons, cut from stale bread and fried in butter, were a common garnish of the era for dishes arriving under a brown sauce.