We eat salads 365 days a year, though too often of the hardy, supermarket lettuce variety. This winter, poring over The Cook’s Garden seed catalog, I was seduced by its description of “buttery, deep-green, velvet-leaved” Bistro Corn Salad listed among the Reader’s Favorites section. Corn salad is called mâche in Europe and on most restaurant menus—this way diners won’t expect to find corn in their salad—and gourmet food shops, where the diminutive, rosette-shaped plant is sold with its roots and a moist clod of dirt attached. Other names for corn salad—and perhaps this is a rare case where the latin name is helpful, Valerianella locusta—are lambs’ tongue and lambs’ lettuce, because of the leaf’s shape; field salad, for the same reason it’s called corn salad, because of where it grows wild, next to the grains; and, by the French, doucette, an endearing epithet which translates as ”tiny sweet one.”
Most cookbooks advise treating mâche simply—a light dressing with walnut oil and squeeze of lemon or few drops of sherry vinegar. The advice is worth paying attention to. I dressed our first mâche salad with too heavy a hand; it tasted sharply of salt, champagne vinegar, and roasted walnut oil—all good flavors in and of themselves, but overpowering to the delicate leaves it was meant to complement. Essentially, the underlying leaf flavor was bland greenness. But then again, that’s how it’s been tasting when picked and eaten straight from the garden. Perhaps we’re eating it too late, our palates already attuned to delicious spring greens, or perhaps this batch just didn’t develop the nuttiness for which good mâche is celebrated.
