ISSUE 13, GREENS, Part 4: Iceberg Lettuce

The Modern Heading Lettuce

Iceberg Lettuce

There were always a family of lettuces designated “heading lettuce” that compacted the leaves into a mass.  But the old heading lettuces types, such as Maryland’s “Hanson”, would exfoliate in hot weather and when it lost its compactness it ceased to be self blanching. 

I suppose one of the great mysteries of food consumption aesthetics was the 19th century rage for white food.  Great labor and ingenuity was extended to mound mud around asparagus to make them white, or to do the same with celery, or to extract the chlorophyll from the skin of okra and cucumbers to create ghostly simulacra of the natural green varieties.  In the 1880s attention was turned to lettuce with two goals: to make the lettuce head like a cabbage, and by doing so render the leaves so pale that they lost their tincture of green.  In 1893-94 breeders affiliated with the J Atlee Burpee company were satisfied with one of their heading lettuce crosses.  Since lettuce was often sold on crushed ice in fancy city produce markets, Burpee played on both the white ice image and the association with high end produce.  In 1894 the Iceberg lettuce was launched. 

A note about icebergs:  the years before the launch of the lettuce saw a number of iceberg disasters that made the national news: the wreck of the schooner Golden Glory on February 18, 1892, the wreck of the schooner Rose off Nova Scotia on June 19, 1895, the collision of the Miranda from Cook’s arctic expedition with an iceberg in July 18, 1894 made front pages from Boston to San Francisco. 

How did Burpee thwart the natural tendency to spread leaves and take in the radiance of the sun?  They bred the ribs of the leaves so thick and stiff that they lacked the flexibility to unfurl.

In certain respects the Iceberg lettuce was the quintessential “modern food”—its uniform configuration enabled easy handling and shipping—its light coloration made it look clean and pure when hosed off before bedding in ice.  Its emphasis of texture over flavor also hewed to the modernist dictum that the more a flood is flavorless the less persons will experience disgust at its taste.  In certain respects it was the opposite of the other great lettuce of the 20th century—Bibb Limestone Lettuce with its rich flavor and buttery texture.  The Iceberg’s lack of intrinsic flavor made it the perfect foil for the vehicle that chefs fashioned for flavor in salads—salad dressing.  The rise of green goddess dressing (the tarragon laced creation of chef Jules Arthur Harder in California) can be correlated with the increase in the production and consumption of Iceberg lettuce (whose cultivation was concentrated in California).

Iceberg was the only lettuce served in my house in the 1950s and 1960s.  My mother, however, did not serve and restaurant wedge dressed in creamy dressing.  She broke it up and incorporated other ingredients (jarred salad olives with pimentos, bacon fragments, hard boiled egg).  I don’t recall eating another variety until sometime in the 1970s—about the time that salad bars began appearing in cafeterias and restaurants.  Since the effect of the iceberg was its compactness the salad bar was not suited to its presentation.  The leaf lettuces staged a comeback—Bibb, Boston, Cos—and my mother, always one to ride a trend asked for it at the Kroger. 

Circa 2000 Iceberg began to appear as dated as an episode of the Jetsons.  Once the icon of modernity, it became a relic of a time when flavor took a back seat to other qualities in vegetables. 

NEVERTHELESS . . . if you like crisp texture . . . and you have a killer salad dressing . . . and vibrate sympathetically with geometric angled segments . . . the iceberg is just what you need.  And you’ll be glad to know that today’s iceberg is greener that those of a century ago.