Lettuce is born with a unique aroma
And its "one dish more to eat" characteristics
It has become one of everyone's favorite vegetables
Lettuce in a supply pack
At first, lettuce was in the beginning
It's not so "tasty"
Lettuce is a type of lettuce
When cleaning lettuce, many people will notice that when breaking the leaves of the lettuce, white milk will flow from the fracture, and if it is the first time to see it, it may be frightened. But this milk is a manifestation of lettuce ancestry - after all, the white emulsion is inherited from its ancestor: lettuce.
Lettuce is a kind of lettuce. As early as 5,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians have been growing lettuce in the valleys on both sides of the Nile. However, lettuce grown by the ancient Egyptians is closer to the wild ancestor of lettuce, wild lettuce.
Wild lettuce in the wasteland
If you see wild lettuce, you must not be able to associate it with the current lettuce. Wild lettuce stems are thin but tall, with small spines on the edges of the leaves, resembling weeds. When it comes to flowering, the yellow chrysanthemum-like flowers show its identity as an asteraceae. Of course, one thing is passed down from generation to generation, and that is the white milk of the stems and leaves.
Lettuce flowers
The ancient Egyptians cultivated lettuce and its close relative, the lettuce, for a great purpose in collecting this white milk. After research, this white milk contains a lot of terpenes and alkaloids, such as lettuce bitters, lettuce, etc., one of their major roles is to paralyze them when they are eaten by insects, and the bitter taste also makes large herbivores retreat. But humans have discovered the magic of these substances: calming and hypnosis.
Milk in lettuce stems
The Romans in the northern Mediterranean also used lettuce. They believe that these milks and their products are simply gifts from God, shining in medicine, and believe that eating lettuce leaves directly raw can have a similar effect. At the same time, with the expansion of the planting range, poor people also pick the bitter leaves of wild lettuce for use as a vegetable for the stomach, and deliberately choose plants with less bitter taste. Finally, driven by the primitive desire to "eat", lettuce, which is specially grown as a vegetable, appeared.
Lettuce is "raw" vegetables
When lettuce was domesticated from lettuce is still a question worth exploring, because from a genomic point of view, there was still a lot of genetic communication between early lettuce and lettuce, but it is currently thought that at least during the Roman Empire, lettuce was already eaten as a leafy vegetable. The Roman Empire rose and fell, but lettuce, a vegetable that guaranteed basic livelihood, was constantly cultivated, and many different varieties were derived.
There is a general law of the domestication of leafy vegetables: in order to increase the yield as high as possible, it is necessary to make the leaves of the plant large and large, so that the leaves become larger and more, and the plant becomes shorter during the vegetative growth period as a significant selection of cultivated varieties. And what we get from this is all kinds of "lettuce".
Green rose lettuce Crumpled lettuce
The term "lettuce" is the name of the Chinese people, which as the name suggests means that most of them can be eaten raw directly. However, different lettuce varieties can still be distinguished by different adjectives. For example, The Roman lettuce, which is representative of the long-leaved lettuce, is one of the most familiar varieties of lettuce in our market, while the glass lettuce and cream lettuce, which are wrinkled leaves and sometimes with broken leaf edges and are often used as salad protagonists, are typical members of the crinkled lettuce; and the cabbage-like lettuce, which is the most crispy, is a member of the bulbous lettuce. But whether it is longleaf lettuce, wrinkled lettuce or bulbous lettuce, the terpenoids and alkaloids in their bodies have been reduced to a very low level, and the astringency is almost impossible to taste, and the white milk is difficult to see. This is also a powerful capital for them to become "lettuce", the most common vegetable in salads.
Lettuce is one of the protagonists of salads
Bitter legacy of the East
Of course, the reduction of the bitterness of lettuce was not a day's work, and the "lettuce" used as a salad was gradually brought to the table of Europeans in the middle and late Middle Ages. The time when lettuce was introduced to the mainland was during the Sui Dynasty, which became a relatively common vegetable in the Tang Dynasty, and the famous poet Du Fu wrote "Planting Lettuce". The Song Dynasty poet Yang Wanli's "Morning Cooking Light Mouth Stone" wrote that "newly picked grapefruit flowers smoked in water, swirling lettuce boiled lettuce (jī)", indicating that the lettuce in the Tang and Song Dynasties was still bitter and bitter, and it was necessary to blanch it with boiled water smoked by the first grapefruit flower, and then eat it with condiments. It was not until the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty that the poet Liu Song wrote that "lettuce should be born, and manjing can be ripe".
However, on the one hand, this also reflects the mainland's eating habit of mainly cooking vegetables and eating them, and it is in this eating habit environment that two other lettuce varieties have been cultivated: lettuce and oil wheat vegetables.
Guess what kind of dish this is?
Around the time of the Song Dynasty, lettuce and oilweed were selected and bred, and they also had more primitive characteristics: narrow and long leaves, and rich milk in the leaves and stem skin. Morphologically, oilweed is like a small, green, thin and short lettuce head, but the bitterness is slightly lighter. The biggest feature of lettuce is that it is large and fleshy, becoming the main edible part. Because the surface of the lettuce stem has nodes formed by the early leaf shedding, it is called a shoot. Until now, Sichuan and other places still call lettuce "green shoots".
Grown lettuce
For lettuce and oil wheat vegetables, under the blessing of Chinese cooking, there are more tricks that can be made than lettuce that is mostly used for cold mixing, hot, blanched, stir-fried, and pickled. The stems of lettuce can also be cut into strips and dried for preservation, which in turn becomes the so-called "tribute dish". Of course, lettuce leaves can also be eaten, but it should be blanched in water or fried in a hot pot. That faint bitterness can remind people of the taste of lettuce that Du Fu and Yang Wanli tasted in those years.
"Tribute dish" made from lettuce processed
Compared to lettuce, lettuce is more popular in the mainland. Because the lettuce stems are more fiber-rich and the water content is relatively low, their storage time is extended. Many times, even if the leaves of the lettuce have withered or even moldy, the fleshy stem is still firm and edible, and after cooking, it becomes a delicious dish on the table.
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Source: Chenshan Botanical Garden