Iceberg lettuce

"focus your palate as you take a bite and notice a clean sweetness blooming beneath the watery crunch, deepening, in the pale ruffle of the inner leaves and stems, to a toasty bitterness, with whispers of caraway and coriander seeds." Helen Rosner - The New Yorker

"This insipid leaf really is a makeweight, its limp crunch releasing nothing but pale, flavourless wateriness. It's so nondescript as to be almost not there at all. Iceberg gives lettuce a bad name, so let's ditch it."

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Well I like iceberg lettuce. I buy it all the time, only occasionally adding other things to the salad mix - though I certainly should do that more often. Nevertheless the two quotes above demonstrate the big divide that there is out there on the virtues of this basic food. I'll admit the taste is delicate but taste there is. And texture too. It's much crunchier than other varieties. And although it doesn't have a huge amount of nutritional value it does have folate - excellent if you are pregnant - fibre, vitamin A and a few other things as well, although not in huge quantities. It's not just water although I guess it's mostly water. Though this is an advantage too - a whole lettuce has less than 100 calories - so you could eat one a day and never get fat. Don't rely on it to boost anything other than folate though.

I suspect it's not much loved by the foragers and the trendies because even Beverley Sutherland Smith whose book The Seasonal Kitchen is about growing vegetables and herbs as well as cooking them, admits that she finds it difficult to grow iceberg. Much easier to grow all those others, that you find in bags of mixed salad leaves these days.

It was apparently developed back in the late 1800s in America to overcome the problems of transporting fragile lettuce. It's a pretty dense lettuce - not loose and leafy like the rest - and it will stay fresh in your fridge for ages. It's something I always have in my fridge because we eat it almost every day as a palate cleanser after our main meal. With a vinaigrette dressing of course. I don't know whether the English have it quite as much as us, or whether they go more for Cos. Which I also like. I like all lettuces really. And interestingly they don't seem to have it much in the French hypermarkets - it's more often those flattish frisées that you see there.

But it certainly has a lot of haters. Nigel Slater calls it "the boring football known as iceberg", and Helen Rosner, writing in the New Yorker reports that most food trendies say, "it’s a lettuce for growers, shippers, warehousers, and sellers, not a lettuce for eaters." But it also has supporters. Helen Rosner is one and Tim Hayward of the Guardian is another:

"Iceberg was the perfect thing for a callow, show-off food lover to reject out of hand in favour of more nutritious romaine, the challenging bite of rocket, the briefly fashionable lamb's lettuce, the honourably local butterhead or the frankly inexplicable appeal of frisée ... Iceberg was never about taste. It was about temperature, texture and being a vehicle for other stuff." Tim Hayward - The Guardian

So as you can see, it's a bit of a war over an innocuous foodstuff. To me it's cheap, it's tasty, soothing and cleansing, and it keeps well. And moreover you can do other things with it, though to be fair you can do other things with all the other lettuces as well but iceberg has a couple of things it can do that others can't or not as well, with perhaps the exception of cos which is also pretty crisp. Yes you can make soup and you can add it to frittatas, quiches and stir-fries but there are a few things that it does better than others.

The first is pickled lettuce. Yes pickled. Turns out you can pickle just about everything and when I went looking for images of pickled lettuce I was treated to a whole lot of jars and tins with Chinese writing - so it's obviously big in Asia. And really I should pickle more things, and then use the pickles. When I pickled some cucumber a little while ago it disappeared very quickly because it was so good. I found two recipes, but there are probably others.

One is on Food 52 and the other was in that New Yorker article, which was an interesting read in itself. The author wrote of it:

"I recently used the pickles as the garnish for a creamy, chilled lettuce soup—made from the darker, softer outer leaves of the same head of lettuce, a deeply fulfilling culinary efficiency. The soup, jolted out of the tedium of luncheon food with a spike of hot sauce, chills in the fridge right next to the pickles. After a day or two, finely slice the pickled hearts, pile them up in shallow bowls, and pour the chilled soup in a moat around them, so that the top of the mountain of greens peeks up above the surface just like—well, like an iceberg. The result is not polyester at all; it’s pure silk." Helen Rosner - The New Yorker

To the Americans apparently iceberg lettuce means a 'wedge salad', which seems to be a wedge of iceberg lettuce topped with bacon and various other things with a blue cheese dressing. Not really my thing - I just don't like blue cheese, but it does look pretty nice. Anyway a typical American diner dish.

"A wedge is a brash used-car salesman of a salad, a primal dish—a rare thing for a plate of raw greens to be." Helen Rosner - The New Yorker

And finally there are all those Asian dishes that are served in lettuce cups - and here iceberg comes into its own, although I guess cos is sometimes used too.

Neil Perry seems to like it - he uses it in stir fries and other things - even salad.

Which brings me back to how most people use it. Me too - a green salad after the main dish. Not in salads generally of which I am not really a huge fan. And it seems I'm not alone:

"All salad is punishment food. It's nutritionally pointless and devoid of joy." Tim Hayward - The Guardian

Which is a bit of a brave statement in a world where, it seems to me, every second recipe in cookery magazines is a salad or has a salad accompanying it.

And the name. They say it was because they shipped it from California covered in ice in the 1920s but actually the name existed way back in the 1890s and then disappeared, but nobody seems to know why it was called iceberg back then. Crisphead was it's other name.