Lazy Salad: The wedge is making a comeback

WEDGE SALAD may be too pedestrian for gourmands, and health nuts may find it beside the point, but done right it can be a spectacularly satisfying dish.

Originally a mechanical device designed to split objects, it can also be a shoe, a political issue or a kind of golf club, and, if you're of a certain age, the salad your mom most likely fixed when you were having company.

I'm talking, of course, about the wedge salad, which is just crisp, iceberg lettuce cut into chunks and topped with dressing, usually blue cheese or thousand island. What better way for us baby boomers to celebrate Mother's Day, especially since May is also National Salad Month?

Unlike the Waldorf or the Caesar salad, no restaurant claims to have invented the wedge salad, but back in the 1960s when no one had ever heard of arugula or radicchio, let alone kale, it was ubiquitous and certainly the ultimate salad for elaborate dinner parties or in fancy restaurants. (Naturally, there's a recipe for it in the Mad Men Cookbook.) Then it fell into disrepute.

Some people objected to the wedge because it was such a simple, even lazy, preparation; others viewed it as the lettuce of oppression, picked mostly by migrant workers, and still others thought it a rip-off. (At Ruth's Chris steakhouses, for example, the salad runs $9, a pretty big markup for a quarter of a head of lettuce that typically retails for less than $2.)

But mostly the salad fell out of favor because it was deemed not epicurean enough in the face of more glamorous greens like mesclun and because home economists, uncharacteristically maligning a vegetable, said it was nutritionally deficient. (It is true that the stuff is hardly nutrient packed. After all, it's 96 percent water.)

Consequently, in the last 25 years or so the popularity of romaine and other leaf lettuces has gone up more than 1,000 percent while at the same time consumption of iceberg lettuce has fallen significantly. (Its true name, by the way, is Crisphead. It got the iceberg moniker because, being especially hardy, it was usually shipped across the country covered in ice.)

Lately, however, the wedge salad has been making a comeback, and having rediscovered the dish myself, I can see why. Nothing can beat the cool crunchiness of crisp iceberg lettuce. No wonder Schlesinger and Willoughby in their book, "Lettuce in Your Kitchen," say it has no substitute. The wedge salad, it seems to me, can proudly take a place of honor in the history of salad-making.

And a long history it is. Lettuce appears in ancient tomb drawings going back almost 5,000 years. The Greeks and Romans made salad a standard part of their diet and, in fact, their early dish, herbs salata, or salted greens, gives us our word "salad."

The wedge salad, as mom knew, is a noble part of this tradition. Granted, it may be too pedestrian for gourmands, and health nuts may find it beside the point, but done right it can be a spectacularly satisfying dish. I think of it as sort of the steak of salads. And yet, while not exactly diet food, it has fewer than half the calories of a steak. (Outback's, for example, is only 357 calories.)

If you're my age, one bite of a wedge is all it takes to bring back memories of mom -- and to make you nostalgic for your salad days.

Wedge Salad

There's not much to a wedge salad, which may be part of its appeal. You can, of course, embellish the basic version with dried cranberries, diced avocado, toasted almonds, sieved hard-boiled eggs, or anything else. In the final analysis, however, this unadorned recipe adapted from Bon Appétit magazine, may be the ultimate version.

4 ounces slab bacon

1/2 small shallot, chopped finely

3/4 cup sour cream

1/2 cup buttermilk

1 tablespoon chopped chives

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese

Salt and pepper

1 head iceberg lettuce

1/4 red onion, sliced thinly

Cut bacon into one-inch-thick pieces and cook over medium-low heat until crisp. Drain on paper towels. Whisk together shallot, sour cream, buttermilk, chives and vinegar. Fold in blue cheese. Season with salt and pepper. Cut lettuce into four wedges and spoon dressing over each. Top with bacon, red onion and additional blue cheese and chives.

Tom Harte's book, "Stirring Words," is available at local bookstores. A Harte Appetite airs Fridays 8:49 a.m. on KRCU, 90.9 FM. Contact Tom at semissourian.com or at the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699.