The Tastiest Way To Eat Lettuce Is By Turning It Into An Appalachian Delicacy

When people describe salads, one word that's typically thrown around is "crisp." While it may not apply to every vegetable in the bowl (crisp tomatoes?), the lettuce part, at least, is expected to have some crunch to it. What can you do if your greens keep wilting in the fridge, though? If you hate to waste food as much as I do (and my hatred grows exponentially as grocery prices rise), you'll be glad to know that there's a dish that deliberately wilts the lettuce, so it won't matter if yours already has a head start. It's known by many names, but the folksiest of these is "kilt lettuce."

No, kilt lettuce isn't Scottish. Instead, it's said to have Appalachian roots, with "kilt" being an alternate spelling of "killed," which is another name the salad often goes by. Why so violent? Are you meant to hack the innocent (if slightly flaccid) vegetable to death with a meat cleaver? No, you'll be killing it with kindness, or rather, with warm bacon grease, which practically amounts to the same thing.

A classic kilt lettuce salad might consist of nothing more than green onions cooked in bacon and poured over lettuce. Some recipes, however, will call for sprinkling some of that cooked bacon over the salad and adding a little vinegar to the grease to give the dressing some tang. Additional ingredients such as honey may also be used for flavoring. All things considered, it's a supremely satisfying side.

Kilt lettuce isn't the only salad recipe to make use of bacon grease as a greens-wilting dressing. In fact, subbing it for the oil in salad dressing may well be one of the tastiest ways to use leftover bacon fat.  A classic salade Lyonnaise uses bacon grease in a warm vinaigrette that wilts bitter leaves of frisée. Cookbook author Michael Ruhlman shares a similar recipe for his version of a very good breakfast salad made from arugula wilted in a warm bacon dressing. Both of these salads supplement the bacon with another type of protein: a poached egg, used as a topper.

"Kilt spinach" is also a thing, although no one actually calls it that. Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond published a recipe for spinach salad made with sautéed red onions and mushrooms, boiled eggs, and hot bacon dressing. She's said it was inspired by similar salads that were popular at restaurants in the '80s.

I, too, have my own wilted spinach recipe that I created by accidentally conflating two salads from an early '70s cookbook called "Cooking with Astrology." My version tops spinach leaves with shredded cheddar, chopped bacon, and a dressing made from bacon grease and lemon juice. Best salad ever, in my opinion, even though I'm neither a Leo nor a Sagittarius (the signs for which those misremembered recipes were created). I also love how it allows me to use up the spinach I inevitably overbuy when it goes on sale, which starts to get droopy in just a few days. This is in line with kilt lettuce tradition, since that original recipe, too, may have been created to use up produce that was no longer at its best.