Wilted Lettuce
My parents are southern folks. We grew up drinking sweet tea, put salt on our watermelon, peanuts in our cokes and ate Charles Chips by the barrel full. Fried chicken was a weekly occurrence with sides of mashed potatoes and pan gravy, white bread, homemade bread-and-butter pickles, tomato and cucumber salad, and wilted lettuce. My mom used to keep a can of bacon grease next to the stove and she’d use it for adding flavor to a pot of green beans and potatoes, making wilted lettuce or just for frying. This was, of course, before we knew of the dangers of saturated fat, sleeping in the back window of the car, or riding your bike behind the bug spray truck.
Since my garden has produced an unreasonable amount of leaf lettuce this year, and my folks were coming over for dinner, I thought this would be a great time to make wilted lettuce. This recipe is my mom’s classic version (although the bacon grease is now substituted with vegetable oil).
8 cups of leaf lettuce
2 T. sugar
Salt and Pepper
1/4 C. thinly sliced onion
1/4 C. vegetable oil
2 T. apple cider vinegar
3 strips of cooked bacon, crumbled
Wash and spin the lettuce and put in a large bowl along with the onions. Sprinkle the sugar on top of the lettuce and add the salt and pepper. In a small pan, heat the oil until medium hot. Remove the pan from the heat and being very careful, pour in the vinegar – it will spatter! Pour the hot oil/vinegar mixture all over the lettuce, add the bacon and toss.