When wild lettuce plants were first domesticated in the Caucasus 6,000 years ago, the crop was valued for its seed, which could be pressed into oil. As cultivated plants migrated west through Egypt into Europe, the Greeks and Romans transformed them into salad leaves. Today, hundreds of commercially grown varieties of lettuce are available all year round.
While lettuce is easy to give away—nobody hates it—it rarely makes an exciting present. It has a reputation as a nutritional blank slate, more water than anything else. Some even claim it burns more calories in digestion than it provides, but that's not true. However, lettuce is a good source of calcium, folate, and vitamins K, A, and C, with nutritional levels varying by type. Romaine lettuce, for example, contains 10 times more vitamin A than iceberg.
Cooking Lettuce: Beyond the Salad Bowl
Lettuce is so associated with salad that the two words are almost synonymous. But cooking lettuce is a common practice. Nigel Slater braises it with peas, leeks, and ham. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall uses lettuce in a gratin baked with spring onions, double cream, and bacon. Emily Scott’s little gem tart is a similar idea with a puff pastry base.
Grilling lettuce on a barbecue is also popular. Tom Hunt treats lettuce like hispi cabbage: chopped into wedges, dressed with oil and salt, and charred on all sides. Yotam Ottolenghi does the same with romaine lettuce split lengthwise, grilled, and served with salsa roja and charred corn relish.
Lettuce Soups and Wraps
Lettuce serves as the main ingredient in various soups. Simple lettuce soup can be made with just onion and potatoes. It is often paired with peas, as in Anna Jones’s romaine, pea, and soft herb soup or Delia Smith’s lettuce, cucumber, and pea soup. These can be served chilled on a hot day or heated through on a cold one.
Rachel Roddy offers a broth with butterhead lettuce parcels stuffed with cheese, egg, nuts, and herbs. Romanian lettuce soup is a traditional dish with many variations; Christopher Kimball of Milk Street offers a version with bacon, spring onions, garlic, dill, and lettuce thickened with egg yolks and yoghurt.
Lettuce thoran is a Keralan stir-fry made with lettuce and coconut. For those who prefer not to heat lettuce, Rukmini Iyer’s lemongrass chicken lettuce wraps provide a hot meal where lettuce is both ingredient and handle.
Creative Uses for Leftover Lettuce
A fresh head of lettuce, properly stored, can outlast Liz Truss’s premiership, but many people regularly throw away wilted leaves. Tom Hunt recommends making green mayonnaise from unwanted outer leaves. A recipe for romaine cream sauce calls for "12 damaged whole romaine lettuce leaves (old, torn and wilted is good)."
A lettuce smoothie is another easy way to use less photogenic leaves. It is said that soaking wilted lettuce in hot water can revive it.
A recipe for lettuce panna cotta may sound like an AI hallucination, but it is real: pureed butterhead lettuce set with lemon zest and sage, from chef Jenn Louis’s cookbook The Book of Greens.
The Lettuce "Cake"
Alice Zaslavsky’s lettuce "cake" is not a cake but a whole head of iceberg lettuce sliced into horizontal slabs and reassembled with a dressing made from English mustard and condensed milk. Each layer is topped with grated hard-boiled egg and chopped chives, then served in wedges like a cake. It may count as a salad, but the word does not begin to cover it.
