By TAMAR ADLER
I like lettuce cooked.
That wasn’t always extraordinary. In the beginning, any pot near an herb garden had a head of lettuce burbling in it. In Apicius, from imperial Rome, we come by: “Cook the lettuce leaves with onion in soda water, squeeze the water out, chop very fine; in the mortar crush pepper, lovage, celery seed, dry mint, onion; add stock, oil and wine.” Cooked lettuce appears in medieval Platina as both physic and nutriment: “The divine Augustus, having fallen ill, was saved by eating lettuce. … Put cooked lettuce, with the water squeezed out, in a dish when you have dressed it with salt and oil and vinegar, and serve it to your guests.”
Nearer, in time and place, there was lettuce à la crème (Downtown Club, 1900), lettuce à la reine (New York Athletic Club, 1900), lettuce demi-glace (St. Regis, 1905). You might have eaten lettuce braised there, or at the Plaza, the Pierre or the Yale Club on any day in the 1930s. Cream of lettuce Bostonienne streamed from a ladle at the Hotel Commodore in 1933; a velouté of lettuce from a larger one aboard the Paquebot Liberté, during a trans-Atlantic voyage in 1959 — after which you might have lunched on cream of lettuce at Harrods and floated home buoyed by a velouté of lettuce Sévigné. The last (braised) evidence I’ve found is at the Yale Club in 1979.