Murder Mystery Salad

Tonight I ate an astonishing quantity of something my husband finds very odd, and I am going to tell you how to make it too.

Before we joined a CSA I had a vague idea that lettuce was a spring food; I didn't know that it's also a fall food. It all bolts and turns bitter in the summer, but you can get two cool-season lettuce crops in these parts. Unfortunately I do not love lettuce any more than I did when I wrote this post in 2004. Mostly Elwood eats the lettuce around here.

Tonight, though, I was doing a vegetable inventory, and I realized there were four -- count 'em, FOUR -- heads of lettuce in the fridge.

Elwood is not going to eat four heads of lettuce.

I went scrabbling around in the sticky file cabinets of my brain in search of dinners that might make a dent in such a lettuce backlog. I thought about doing a grain bowl kind of thing with shredded lettuce to go on top, or lettuce wraps with an Asian-flavored filling, but the idea that made me say YES YES COOK THAT was a killed lettuce salad.

Killed lettuce salad is one of those Southern foods, like spoonbread, that makes me nostalgic even though we never ate it in my house when I was growing up. My mother tells me that her sister might have served it to us when we visited, and I have dim memories of people ordering spinach-mushroom versions in restaurants. It's a little weird for me to get nostalgic about killed lettuce salad when I would never have put it in my mouth as a picky kid, but hey-- "a little weird" is practically this blog's tagline.

To make a killed lettuce salad, fry up 5 strips of bacon. When they are crisp, set them aside to drain and brown a finely sliced small onion in the hot fat. When the onion is nicely browned, set it aside. Add a pinch of sugar and 2 T. apple cider vinegar to the hot bacon fat along with a sprinkle of red pepper flakes. Stir it all up and keep it hot.

This is the weird part: put a pile of torn lettuce leaves on a big plate with crumbled bacon and browned onion, and coat them with a generous amount of hot dressing. The lettuce will wilt slightly, and the salty tangy slightly sweet richness of the dressing may cause you to levitate slightly. 

Do not make more of this than you can eat right away, because the bacon fat will congeal as it cools. And even for someone whose love of bacon fat is firmly established, that's kind of gross.

I do not actually know if "Murder Mystery Salad" is a more appealing name than "Killed Lettuce Salad" to people who didn't grow up with hot bacon fat on wilted lettuce, but maybe it is. And maybe I'm not the only person in the Midwest whose veggie drawers are overflowing with lettuce right now.

P.S. Is this weird to you, and where are you from, and do you know it as "killed lettuce" or "wilted lettuce"?

Comments

[Celeste]

I was just telling someone else today about a local restaurant chain that replaced their side of potatoes with a small side of dressed salad greens. If you have Bibb lettuce, I can honestly say that Chrissy Teigen’s Asian lettuce wraps are something delicious.

[bearing]

Wilted lettuce, although more often it's spinach. I have never in my life heard it called "killed."

[Melanie B]

I've often made this with baby spinach. I've always heard it called a wilted salad, though. "Killed" is a new one on me. I don't think I ever heard of this growing up, though. I think I encountered it about the time I was in grad school.

[giedra]

I had never heard "killed" either. I have never tried it with romaine or iceberg type lettuces, but I have done wilted greens with arugula or spinach. I am kind of sad that I do not have an overload of lettuce right now! However, I do have a bunch of tiny sprouts in my garden and who knows, maybe they'll get big enough before real winter sets in that I can enjoy some killed lettuce salad. (Or I can buy some lettuce!!) YUM!

[Zagorka]

Never heard of it here in Germany (and in Croatia either) but sounds very much worth a try!

[Tracy]

I have a recipe from my grandmother that is a hot lettuce salad, and I vaguely remember bacon with it. So I might have to find it and see if it resembles your killed lettuce salad.

[Lee]

From Texas and subsequently north Florida and Georgia (whew!) and I've always just known that as the only kind of Spinach Salad there is. ;) Never heard it called "killed." Funny!