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Lettuce Salad
(Normandy.) Wash and pick 2 heads of salad lettuce. Dry the leaves, and tear them apart. Make a dressing of salt, pepper, yolk of 2 eggs, 1/2 cup of cream, 1 dozen capers, and 4 teaspoonfuls of tarragon vinegar. Beat well, and pour over the leaves, toss and stir until every leaf is coated.
A soft, uncooked cream-and-yolk dressing rather than an oil vinaigrette, which makes the state of the leaves and the timing of dressing the whole of the dish.
- The hinge: dress at the tableAn egg-and-cream dressing has no oil to hold it, and it wilts butter lettuce within minutes. Beat the dressing ahead, keep it cold, and pour it over only when the salad is going out.
- "Salad lettuce"Most likely a soft butterhead of the Boston type rather than a crisp romaine, though the recipe does not specify. Two heads of butterhead give roughly 8 to 10 cups of loose leaves, enough for four.
- Raw yolksThe yolks are never heated. Use pasteurized eggs or pasteurized yolks, particularly if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised; the dressing will behave identically.
- The creamHalf a cup of cream here is best read as a heavy or whipping cream, around 36 percent fat, to give the dressing body; the thin "table cream" sold under the same word in some markets today will stay looser.
- Tarragon vinegarFour teaspoons is about 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon, and it is the only acid in the dressing. Commercial tarragon vinegars vary a great deal in strength; add half, taste, then finish.
- CapersA dozen capers is a teaspoon or two, depending on size. Rinse brined capers and pat them dry, or drain and rinse salt-packed ones thoroughly; left salty, they can make the added salt unnecessary.
- Drying the leaves"Dry the leaves" is not a formality here — any clinging water thins a cream dressing immediately and it slides off. A spinner followed by a few minutes on a towel is worth the trouble.
- BeatingWhisk salt, pepper and vinegar into the yolks first, then add the cream in a thin stream. Added the other way round, the acid may curdle the cream.
The Normandy attribution fits the region's dairy: the dressing is bound with cream and yolk rather than oil. Cream dressings for soft lettuce are found in northern France and further north in German- and Dutch-speaking regions, though the explanation that oil was dearer there than butterfat is a generalisation rather than a documented cause. Tarragon vinegar was a common pantry item, sold bottled and also made at home by steeping the herb in white wine vinegar, and it appears often in salad dressings of the period. A single regional attribution of this kind is best treated as a souvenir of a regional way of doing things rather than as canonical Norman practice.