Bitter greens in salads

One of the best salad greens we get here in France on a regular basis is scarole — escarole in English and it's sometimes called that in French too. We've been enjoying it for the past few weeks, and it's a wintertime product. It's a member of the chicory family, along with frisée (curly or frisée endive) and endive (Belgian endive).

The chicory family gives salad greens that are on the bitter side. Much of the bitterness of the original plants has been bred out of them by selective propogation, but some remains. Often they are "blanched" — in other words, protected from sunlight so that they leaves are whiter and more tender. Other bitter greens, from different plant families, are pissenlit (dandelion leaves), cresson (watercress), and mâche (lamb's lettuce). All these are treated the same way in French salads.

A standard French salad of escarole and red beets

To counter the slight bitter taste, people make salads of escarole, frisée, or Belgian endive that include sweet, salty, or other strong-flavored ingredients. The classic salade lyonnaise, for example, is curly endive with smoked pork lardons (bacon) and a poached egg, with a vinegary dressing. Hard-boiled eggs pair with Belgian endive or escarole salads, and so do cheeses like Roquefort or cubes of Gruyère or Comté. The saltiness of bacon or cheese mutes the bitterness of the greens.

Often the dressings served with bitter greens of this type are made with a good amount of garlic or shallots, which also take off the bitter edge. Sometimes garlic croutons, called chapons, are added to the salad for both their crunchy texture and their taste, which are good with the bitter greens. Walnuts are very good in these bitter salads too, for their sweetness and nuttiness.

Smoked pork lardons and a garlicky vinaigrette dressing
make another standard French escarole salad.

Mild lettuces like batavia (green leaf lettuce), laitue (Boston lettuce), or feuille de chêne (oakleaf lettuce) are too tender and delicate to stand up to such strong, assertive ingredients. The more tender lettuces are usually just dressed with a mild vinaigrette, made with less vinegar and more good oil, and sometimes flavored with fresh herbs or a little chopped shallot.

One salad ingredient that lends sweetness to bitter greens is betteraves (beets or beetroot). Beets are tossed with Belgian endive, frisée, escarole, watercress, or, especially, mâche. The beets themselves are usually dressed first with vinaigrette and chopped shallots. Red wine vinegar goes especially well with beets, and toasted walnuts are good in a salad with them and escarole or frisée, for example.

Escarole, beets, vinaigrette, and good bread... oh là là

The nice thing about beets in France is that you normally buy them already cooked. They are sold out of a paper-lined crate at the markets and even at the supermarket, but sometimes you get them shrink-wrapped (sous vide). They are a standard item and available everywhere. Buying them pre-cooked means you are saved the long cooking time they require. One of my French books says that raw beets need to be boiled for three hours!

That's a very long time and I think that the raw beets we get today don't need more than about an hour's cooking, whether in boiling water or wrapped in foil and roasted in the oven. In her cookbook from the 1920s (I think), the woman who called herself Tante Marie wrote this about beets:

Tante Marie says beets are better cooked in a slow oven,
where their sugars develop more fully. She says to leave
them in the oven to cook for at least seven hours!

Roasted for seven hours! I bet the beets are really good cooked that way, but the instructions date back to a time when the kitchen stove was also a source of heat for the whole house. There was always a fire going in the kitchen when the weather outside was chilly. So you had the luxury of putting beets in a place in the oven where they wouldn't burn and leaving them there all day, or overnight.

If you can get endive, escarole, or frisée (curly endive) where you live, try them in salad with the flavor ingredients they are served with in France. They are good for you, interesting in texture and taste, and they make a good change from everyday tossed salads.