WILTED LETTUCE SALAD

If you had any kind of garden in the South, a warm Spring morning could engender a craving that lasted for a whole morning of hoeing and watering and maybe picking those first tender little mustard greens or early lettuce or spinach; just thinking of that gentle vinegar tang and the bacon dressing could keep you craving so's you could finish up or at least get to a good Quittin' Place before eleven.  Small green onions, still akin to chives---those are worth picking early, before their growth is fully on them. A cousin-onion or two, fifty-cent-size white ones above the dirt and beginning to widen their shoulders,   a handful of little ruby radishes unearthed gleaming in your hands, lots of grabs into the mustard-bed---these comprise one of the glories of the Southern cooking lexicon: Wilted Lettuce Salad.   You can even put in a pan of crusty cornbread while you're out picking, so as to get the oven done early and the heat abating in the house. 

It’s a last-minute dish, with the cool little greennesses washed and spun and snugged into a bag with damp paper towels, or it cooperates quite well with a quick trip to the garden to pick the best leaves, then a sluice of cold water and a dry-patting with paper towels, and not even a trip into the house. Set the patio or arbor table, put out all the food, pour the iced tea, THEN bring out the dressing and dress the salad at the last possible second.

Use any lettuce but iceberg to make this salad. Redleaf and frilly Simpson are good. Any combination of looseleaf lettuce or arugula or spinach meld beautifully. And best of all, if you can get away with it: the tiniest, just-unfurled leaves of curly mustard, with the bittery-ness not QUITE developed, just enough to punctuate all the mild shyness of the little lettuces.  It takes a LOT of greens, folks, because of the shrinkage in the heat of the just-poured dressing, and also because there's a tendency to just fork up great mouthfuls of the tender vegetables with that salty/vinegary tang, more than if they were just greens from the pot-likker or pole beans in their juice.   

You can start the bacon frying while you go prepare the lettuce and slice thin-thin little moons of the onion,   Get the bacon crisp, remove to drain, then crumble, but leave all those drippings in the skillet. Make sure the drippings are still hot; stir a teaspoon of sugar into a good glug of cider or wine vinegar (or rice vinegar, our favorite), along with a scant teaspoon of salt. Then pour this gently into the hot skillet, stirring with a long spoon.  

Have the torn greens in a big deep bowl, with the sliced onions and any other additions you choose. Pour on the hot dressing, add the bacon, toss quickly and serve---the aroma will make you swoon.  Set one of the chillun to grinding the peppermill over all while you toss and serve the tangy, more-than-salad mouthfuls with thick wedges of cornbread or thin, crisp ones---the marriage of limpening vegetables, in the best possible window between freshly-picked and gently cooked, is an unctuously sumptuous amalgam reached by few ingredients, with each lifted higher by the other.  

This sublime dish was the favorite of a neighbor, made in a huge crockery bowl with the heft of five bricks, and called "Wil-did Leddis Sallid" by her family. She sometimes threw in a several chopped boiled eggs, and the lagniappe was the saved-til-last treat: dipping that big ole long stirring-spoon into the bowl, hearing it scrape gently across the crockery, and spooning up some of the luscious, vinegar-y, bacon-y bowl-drippin's onto your cornbread.

A wonderful restaurant here used to make the dressing, bringing it out hot and fragrant in its own little pitcher, for pouring onto your spinach salad, which already had slices of the whitest lengthwise mushrooms, rings of red onion, and a little dish of crumbled bacon for sprinkling,. Each addition led the next, with the whole warm dressing/cool salad mixed at the last second and eaten while the flavors and temperatures were still at their best. That’s the closest restaurant version to the centuries-old Southern treat.

I'm thinking a table set out under our arbor space, candles flickering in time with the fireflies, and wide soup-bowls of this salad set before each guest, a gentle-fried egg atop, with a quick grind of pepper, and some thin cornbread wedges snuggled alongside for sopping up the last delicious juices.      I can't BEGIN to think what course could follow that. Maybe just a whole punchbowl full of Strawberry Shortcake---for four.