seven recipes and a dressing lesson

Green salad with garlic croutons

Lettuce is nothing and lettuce is a miracle, says Onno Kleyn, an invention of the cosmos with a wink from the magician. With just oil and vinegar and freshly baked garlic croutons, a French customer made this a jaw-dropping starter.
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Young lettuce for Kopland

If there is a poet who has added lettuce to the canon of Dutch poetry forever, it is Rutger Kopland. When he died, Pay-Uun Hiu paid homage to his young lettuce, simply flavored with vinaigrette or old Dutch dressing and a soft-boiled egg.
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Classic: Caesar Salad

American-Italian chef Caesar Cardini’s salad is a classic as it is served far from it in many restaurants. Loethe Olthuis brings the Caesar salad back to its true nature: a brilliant combination of parmesan, anchovies, egg, croutons and fresh romaine lettuce or little gem.
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Tired lettuce

In Normandy, Sake Slootweg learned to “fat” lettuce, an act necessary to toss the leaves just long enough for the dressing to be complete, but they don’t become mushy from the weight of the sauce. “To tire the salad”, say the French. But in Dutch it’s just called “fatigeren”.
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Onion Quiche

Tallina van den Hoed found a cookbook from the 1980s with inexpensive dishes. Cooking under a ten, i.e. in guilders, will no longer be possible anytime soon. But with its onion and lettuce quiche, it stayed under 10 euros. It’s not in the book, but it’s cool.
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Shrimp salad

Members of the posh New England Fat Men’s Club in Vermont didn’t look a dime. Anyone weighing less than 100 kilograms was not allowed to enter. And those pounds didn’t come from a cheap supermarket, but from the good life. Marie Louise Schipper chose from a 1904 menu the only fairly modest dish that still contained green. Think celery, spring onions and lettuce.
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Packets of stuffed lettuce

For a slightly heartier meal with lettuce, Onno Kleyn consulted a cookbook with recipes from the best slow food osterias in Italy and made packets of lettuce with a medallion of veal in tomato sauce. It’s a bit of a hassle to fold lettuce leaves into wrappers, but keep calm – it’s slow food for a reason. And the result may be there.
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Dressing lesson

Make a good salad, cook well As Alice Waters told our food critic Hiske Versprille, it’s the alpha and omega of cooking. This is something everyone should be able to do. That’s why a crash course in dressing from the undisputed godmother of America’s farm-to-table movement and founder of the upscale restaurant Chez Panisse. “Look at your leaves – they must be looking back.”
Click here for Waters Lessons