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Mesclun: A Truly Upscale Salad
Plants & Gardens News Volume 14, Number 1 | Fall 1999
by Elizabeth McGowan
The 1990s will go down in culinary history as the decade America became a nation of salad snobs. The era when iceberg lettuce descended to the status of Wonder Bread—acceptable only in airplanes, truck stops, or retro-diners as a side dish for meatloaf or tuna casserole. Sure, iceberg still makes an appearance in respectable restaurants to add crunch to more exotic salad fare—and to make the pricier greens stretch further. But iceberg as the main event? Strictly déclassé.
Designer greens began registering on the American gourmet radar in the mid-eighties with the importation of mesclun, a mix of baby lettuces and wild greens, including chervil, arugula, mizuna, mache, and endive favored in France. Like the French jeans that adorned the trendiest U.S. derrieres a decade earlier, mesclun, marketed with its continental cachet, was soon seen in all the right places.
It proved a food in tune with its times. As medical journals touted greens for their preventive properties in heart disease and cancer, salads, ever more creative and no longer confined to opening act status, increasingly shared top billing with meat, fish, and pasta on dinner tables nationwide.
Mesclun also provided the perfect antidote to the excesses of the eighties. Elegant, without being ostentatious; delicious, but understated, mesclun reflected the restraint of more sober times. With Wall Street downsizing and the real estate market collapsing, mesclun and Range Rovers replaced caviar and BMWs as indulgences for those who still had money to spend, but the grace not to flaunt it—and those who didn't have money, but wanted to look like they did. Mesclun, though expensive compared to its proletarian green cousins, added oeuvre to a menu, without breaking the budget.
Unlike French jeans, mesclun seems to be here to stay, surviving the boom of the mid-nineties and the current fluctuating stock market. It's easy to see why: Once exposed to a peppery arugula or a tart purslane, how can Americans return to the pallid world of iceberg?
In typical Yankee fashion, Americans have put their own spin on traditional mesclun, democratizing the elitist green pool with leafy edibles of all descriptions and origins. This open admissions policy—and the packaging and cheapening of ingredients by produce giants—has some gourmands yearning for the highbrow mix of the French original. Food critic Marian Burros, for one, bemoaned the "dumbing down" of mesclun in The New York Times last year, panning the marketing of bland, pedestrian ingredients under a fancy name.
Of course, at this time of the year the vagaries of the produce stand mean nothing to gardeners. Free to grow whatever we personally define as mesclun, we can be as maverick or status quo in our salad adventures as we please, the French, food critics, and Dole, Inc., be damned. And if our tastes secretly run to iceberg, who's going to know if we sneak some in the privacy of our kitchens? If we get caught, we can say we're going retro!
Elizabeth McGowan is a former editor ofP&G News.