Kilt Lettuce and A Spring Celebration
Mary Waldrop kneels beside a mountain brook in Unicoi County, Tennessee. She has spotted something. It’s a bright green plant, a welcome sight after a long winter. The edges of its leaves are serrated. We’ve come, on this day in early May, to dig ramps. But as I take a drink of that cold, crisp water, Mary calls out, “Branch lettuce!”
Mary forages enough for a “mess,” that wonderfully indefinite mountain measurement—enough to feed your family or anyone else who happens by. She saves a mess of ramps, too. We’ve been digging these wild mountain leeks in preparation for the annual Flag Pond Ramp Festival, put on by the local Ruritan Club, in an old schoolhouse about five miles from the North Carolina line.
As busy as she is in preparing for the festival, Mary cuts the ramp dig short to take home her treasures. Like her mother and grandmother have taught her, and as mountain people have done for generations, she makes “killed lettuce” that day.
It’s a marriage of fresh spring lettuce, ramps or onions, and rendered pork fat. And it’s flavored with long shelf-life staples—vinegar, salt, pepper and sometimes sugar.
The dish is often listed in cookbooks as “wilted lettuce,” but that term lacks the personality and punch of the word “killed.” In the Afton, Bright Hope, and Orebank communities of East Tennessee where my people come from, “kilt” was the common pronunciation.
Making killed lettuce involves a delicate balance, to wilt the green elements of the dish without actually cooking them, so that the flavors of the springtime are not lost.
Lettuce and green onions are among the first plants to produce in the garden, and ramps are one of the first green plants to appear on the forest floor in springtime. A bowl of killed lettuce is a sign that spring has arrived. For some, it’s a spring tonic. And it’s about the closest thing to a salad that many traditional mountain cooks will admit to.
A friend now living in Texas recalls how his father would pick lettuce leaves and green onions from the garden while his mother heated bacon grease in a skillet and poured in a mixture of vinegar, water, sugar, and lots of black pepper. The concoction would immediately erupt, and she’d pour it over the big bowl of chopped garden greenness. For those who have made killed lettuce this way, the explosive sound of vinegar hitting hot grease is unforgettable.
A pot of grease kept near the stove is still a refreshingly common sight in many Appalachian kitchens. When bacon or streaked meat are fried, the grease is drained off into the pot and left there all the time, at room temperature, ready for chicken frying or lettuce killing or maybe a pot of what we in the mountains simply call cooked cabbage.
Killed lettuce need not be all green. I know cooks who add radishes or even store-bought tomatoes. In the Tazewell, Tennessee, kitchen of the late Pauline Harmon Smith, diced, boiled eggs were a common addition to killed lettuce, always with a side of hot fried cornbread.
Chef Sean Brock grew up eating killed lettuce at his grandmother’s table in Wise, Virginia. He now runs the Husk restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Greenville, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. Paying homage to springtime in Appalachia, he serves a Killed Lettuce Salad in his restaurants. His version is as simple and straightforward as his grandmother’s, always with a side of cornbread.
At a time when cooking according to the seasons has become almost a universal restaurant menu theme, it’s important to realize that Appalachian people have been doing it for a long, long time. For that killed lettuce legacy, I’m grateful every spring.
About the author: Fred Sauceman’s latest book is The Proffitts of Ridgewood: An Appalachian Family’s Life in Barbecue.