Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
lowed cooks to buy greens that had already been cut and mixed at the packing shed. At
first this product was intended mainly for institutional use - big bags of chopped salad
would save lots of labor in hotel and hospital kitchens. But today between 35 and 40 per-
cent of the lettuce grown in the United States winds up in one of those salad bags.
Although rarely trumpeted on the label, iceberg, shredded into pieces, is often included
in bagged mixes. Americans, it turns out, still want to have some crunch, even in sup-
posedly sophisticated salads. But if you take away the iceberg that goes into the shredder
you'll find that the production of whole-head iceberg has fallen to less than 40 percent of
the lettuce crop today. Ironically, while iceberg lettuce is taking a dive here, it is being in-
creasingly planted in Europe, where it is perceived as a hot new thing.
Leading the charge against iceberg is romaine, which is called cos in Europe. Romaine
is an entirely respectable lettuce, combining what is good about iceberg (the crunch) with
a sweet, more emphatically green flavor. The other main families of lettuce grown in the
United States are leaf, which forms very loose, rosette-shaped heads (think green and red
oak leaf), and butterhead, which has loose, round heads with soft leaves (think Bibb).
These generally have a fairly mild flavor and tender texture.
Of course, in today's crazy mesclun world, many of the things we eat as lettuces aren't
really that at all. Some are endives, which are closely related to lettuces but tend to be
coarser in texture and more bitter in flavor. There are about as many endives as there are
lettuces. Belgian endive (Cichorium intybus), sometimes called witloof chicory, is the one
that is usually forced into those long, white, tapered heads. Forcing really does raise farm-
ing almost to the level of industry - or at least high craft. Belgian endive plants are started
in the field. After they leaf out, they are dug up, the green tops are trimmed, and the bases
are replanted in a warm, dark room. This prevents the plant from developing chlorophyll,
which would turn it green and change the flavor.
Another leafy endive (Cichorium endivia var. crispa) goes by the name of salad
chicory. It has curly, deeply notched leaves that are dark green on the outside, brightening
to pale yellow or almost white at the center. (High-flown frisee is a slightly different vari-
ety of the same family.) This leafy endive is sometimes mistakenly called escarole. True
escarole (which is another variety of C. endivia - latifolium) has broad leaves arranged in
a loose head looking much like a fleshy type of leaf lettuce.
Then there is the multitude of radicchios, a noisy Italian family of C. intybus. The
round iceberg lettuce-looking variety, Chioggia (officially, rosa di Chioggia) is the most
familiar, but there are several others. Castelfranco forms looser heads, more like Bibb
