Heading Lettuce & the Creation of the Iceberg
In the great produce markets of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston the ranks of value were generally known when it came to lettuce: the darker the green, the thicker the leaf, the tougher the texture, the cheaper the product. The more yellowish or whitish the inner leaves, the more “refined” and desirable the lettuce was. Leaves should be thin and crisp, brittle when torn for a salad; the more limp, thick, and stringy, the more the consumer avoids the head. In earlier times, the absence of insects counted for much: no lettuce lice, no green fly. Heading lettuce tended to have lighter leaves toward the compact center of the balled head. It was generally valued more highly that the standing cos (romaine) lettuce varieties. Early in the 19th century the demand for crisp tender lettuce at all seasons of the calendar drove the experiments of the glass house gardeners, fancy vegetable breeders who specialized in forcing crops out of season.
There were several famous heading lettuces in the 19th century: the Hanson, the Brown Stubborn Headed (Trotzkopf), the Drumhead (cabbage head), the Butterhead, the French Imperial Head, Large Yellow Prince’s Head, and the diminutive Tennisball. Many of these had a modest compact sphere of leaves ringed with a corona of loose leaves. The butterhead varieties made the outer leaves tolerable by tenderness. But as a general rule, lettuce growers sought to breed a head that was large with minimal loose skirting leaves—the big ball.
Of these old varieties, one became greatly significant—the Hanson. The ancestor was “curled India lettuce” imported into Maryland in 1800 and there improved by the Hanson family outside of Baltimore. When Col. George Hanson conveyed seed to the Henry Dreer Seed Company of Philadelphia in 1870, he wrote, "The original seed was imported many years ago, and it was cultivated by my father and grandfather for seventy years. My father never allowed any other to be put upon his table. It is superior in every respect to any lettuce he ever saw, for these reasons: the heads are the largest, a single one is frequently large enough for an ordinary sized family ; the leaves are exceedingly crisp and tender, and (if cut early in the morning) seem to break like pipe stems; the color is of the most beautiful green without, and white within, and is entirely free from that peculiar grassy taste found in some varieties.” The Dreer Company made it one of the favorite winter lettuces grown in the United States. The white seeds were planted in late September, the young plants laid out in open furrows in late October/early November, with heading in open fields in April, or early March if you are in the deep south. During the final decades of the 19th century the Hanson was a major market lettuce, with heads ranging fro 2 to 3 lbs. Yet its tenderness—a plus for palatability—became a minus for transportation, and the Hanson was supplanted as a market variety in the 1910s. In 1904 it was the second most popular variety grown in the country. By 1923 it had dropped to fifth. Thereafter home gardeners kept the variety thriving because it was more heat tolerant than Early Simpson Lettuce. In has become one of the significant heirloom lettuce varieties, available from several seed companies. Reasons why it survived? Perhaps those laid out in its first advertisement in 1871: “The most tender, sweet and delicious variety grown; free from any bitter or unpleasant taste: heads large and solid, often weighing 3 lbs.”
Toward the great white lettuce
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.
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.
The 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. Still . . . if you like crisp text . . . 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.