Lots of food trends involve expensive or hard-to-find ingredients, complicated preparation or some other reason to not try it at home. But one thing I never saw until a couple of years ago, and have since seen it dozens of places — a pretty good definition for “trendy” — is the wedge salad. This is the exception that proves all the rules for trendy foods: It’s actually easier than a “regular” salad.
Ingredients
iceberg lettuce (yes, it has to be iceberg)
tomatoes
cucumbers
red bell peppers
bacon bits
herbed croutons
creamy Italian dressing
parmesan cheese
Directions
This is a really short one, only one step that I haven’t already written up. Prep all the toppings first. Core and quarter the tomatoes. You can core it first, or cut the stem out after you quarter it. Then slice the bell pepper, and peel the cucumber.
Finally, core and quarter the lettuce.
See those pieces? That shape is called … umm … let’s see, it was right on the tip of my tongue … oh yeah! Wedges. That’s what makes it a wedge salad. Just take an entire quarter — one wedge — and put it in your salad bowl. If you really want to extend the theme, cut the cucumber and tomato into wedges too.
Add the rest of the toppings, and that’s it.
Coming up is the dinner that went along with this salad. I went trendy with the salad, so the dinner is about as traditional as you can get. Sign up using the form to the right to make sure you don’t miss it.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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7 Comments
I love iceberg lettuce. And ever since I saw Jacques Pepin extolling its virtues on his PBS cooking show, I’ve decided that I shouldn’t be ashamed of my preference for iceberg anymore. But I still don’t buy it, because we’ve got enough lettuce to feed the world in our garden. None of it is iceberg though. Boo.
You realize, of course, why all the food snobs look down on iceberg? Because it’s cheap and widely available. Being a snob is all about being better than everyone else. How can you do that when you’re eating the same thing as everyone else?
It’s just like fashion. This year’s high style is always whatever you’re guaranteed to not already have.
I LOVE wedge salad! Thanks for the tutorial!
I think wedge salads were pretty popular in the '70s…at least in our house they were. My mom made this all the time, but maybe it was just because it was so easy!
Wendy, I wasn't paying attention to the grown-ups menu in the 70s, so I wouldn't have noticed that. It does look like a very 70s thing to do, though.
The disdain some have for iceberg lettuce does not originate in snobbishness toward the “cheap and widely available.”
Real foodies in my experience–while they certainly have tastes for various exotic ingredients from around the globe–actually construct the bulk of their meals from the most commonplace of raw whole ingredients… much as their grandmothers did, in fact.
The disdain for iceberg is rooted in the fact that it’s too often flavorless: crunch and water and not much else. It’s been bred (in the most-available supermarket variety) for durability–suitability for mechanized harvesting and long-distance transport, characteristics which do not marry well with depth, subtlety or complexity in flavor. (The same dynamic, of course, applies in various degrees to other supermarket produce, most criminally tomatoes and strawberries.)
I always thought looking down on iceberg came from its low nutritional value. Everyone is saying that the rule of thumb is greener is better, and that’s why we should pick dark, leafy greens like romaine lettuce. But iceberg lettuce is still many steps up from no lettuce. Plus, romaine doesn’t “wedge”.