Let Us Consider Lettuce

By Audrey Stallsmith

Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce. . .why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.

William Shakespeare, Othello I iii

I actually contrived to grow lettuce (Lactuca sativa) this year after all the seed washed away last summer. This time I covered the row with damp burlap until the seedlings sprouted. So I ended up with mixed greens, mixed lettuces, and buttercrunch lettuce from that seed, along with a few romaine seedlings that I purchased.

The mixed greens, which included cresses, kale, spinach, and etc., got infested by flea beetles and soon bolted. But the lettuces still are flourishing. 

I’m probably going to have to eat most of them myself, since Dad—like many males—is not enthusiastic about salad greens unless they are cooked. One tough guy, Dashiell Hammett opined that it was a better idea to “Feed the lettuce to the bunny and eat the bunny.” 

Perhaps the macho aversion to salad harks back to the Greek legend that Adonis, the god of desire, was killed in a bed of lettuce. That may be why the plant became associated with male impotence and death along with female barrenness.

However, those associations probably actually were due to the fact that wild lettuce (Lactuca virosa) can put you to sleep, and extracts of it were used as a narcotic during World War II. We can guess that was all it was good for, since its species name describes it as “having an unpleasantly strong taste or smell.”

The part collected—the plant’s dried white juice—is reminiscent of that gathered from opium poppies. In fact, those poppies even have been called “lettuce poppies” due to the similarity of their foliage to that of the green. 

Lettuce actually derives its Latin name Lactuca (“milk”) from that aforementioned white blood. Sativa means “cultivated.”

John Evelyn, who gardened back in the 1600s, commented that “By reason of its soporigous quality, lettuce ever was, and still continues the principal foundation of the universal tribe of Sallets, which is to cool and refresh, besides its other properties. . .including beneficial influences on morals, temperance, and chastity.” We can guess that some guys would just as soon do without those beneficial influences! 

Still, lettuce—which originated as a Mideastern weed—has been eaten by just about everybody since several thousand years before Christ. In addition to its employment as a sedative, it also has been used medicinally to treat dropsy (water retention), colic, and cough.

The original type resembled romaine, which eventually derived its name from being grown in the papal gardens in Rome. The cos comes in from the lettuce also undergoing cultivation on the Greek island of Kos.   

Thomas Jefferson must have been one of those unusual guys who liked “sallet”, because he grew 17 lettuce varieties at Monticello. For a while there, from the 1940s to the 1960s, almost everybody was eating  the then new iceberg type since it was so much easier to ship than leaf lettuce is. Fortunately, the swing back to healthier eating in the 1970s “trucked” the more nutritious greens along with it.

Although most lettuce breeding has been aimed at making the plant less bitter, its flavor can vary according to the season and conditions in which it is grown. I probably should have started mine earlier in the year, so as not to subject it to our present near-90-degree weather. Charles Dudley Warner advised that lettuce should be “like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.”   

Fortunately I placed the greens on the cooler side of the garden, which is shaded from mid-afternoon on, so their flavor still is fresh. And, as far as I can tell, not at all soporigous!

 

Latuca sativa image is by G. Bonelli from Hortus Romanus juxta Systema Tournefortianum, courtesy of plantillustrations.org.