![]() ![]() Atlee Burpee & Company in the late eighteen-hundreds, and for the next three quarters of a century was the undisputed queen of American salad greens. One of a variety of cabbage-like lettuces called crisphead, iceberg is distinguished by thick interior leaves that are forced, as they grow, into fractal labyrinths, which fold over and back on themselves until they are a self-supporting mass. For starters, it’s far from flavorless: focus your palate as you take a bite and notice a clean sweetness blooming beneath the watery crunch, deepening, in the pale ruffle of the inner leaves and stems, to a toasty bitterness, with whispers of caraway and coriander seeds. But, like its glacial namesake, iceberg lettuce has a lot more going on beneath the surface. “It doesn’t have a sense of place.” The only thing iceberg really has going for it is durability, this line of thinking goes-it’s a lettuce for growers, shippers, warehousers, and sellers, not a lettuce for eaters. ![]() “It is omnipresent,” Alice Waters, goddess of the farmer’s market, sniffed in a 2001 interview. The influential Times food editor Craig Claiborne famously loathed it. To its detractors, iceberg is the avatar of commodity gastronomy-“the polyester of lettuces” is a popular gibe. There are many categories of salad snob-the ingredient minimalists, the chop evangelists, the dressing-goes-in-the-bowl-first brigade-but perhaps the most vocal, and the most misguided, are those dedicated to the denigration of iceberg lettuce.
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