Salad : The Greens Goddess

The ultimate salad tool of the ‘60s was the wooden salad bowl, put to best use by the Playboy-affected bachelor in his singles apartment with the killer view of sailboats, ready to conquer yet another bowl of romaine for the benefit of a female audience of one. And with each successive match of man and garlic came the inevitable problem--a lingering unpleasantness in the air, the funk of salads past. The bowl had turned rancid.

In 1994, the essential tool might be the unromantic-sounding salad-in-a-bag. With bag well hidden, the home cook projects the image of a dedicated gardener, one with the knowledge and time to grow, oh, five or six varieties of baby greens. And yet, salad-in-a-bag is pure convenience food with its own set of potential problems--namely, slimy leaves.

Somewhere between the bowl and the bag, many of us learned to make a decent salad. Spurred by the revived interest in the books of Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher, who spent pages describing the delights of a simple green salad; by the obsession with freshness articulated by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters; by costly oils and vinegars promoted by merchants eager to find the purest products in the most obscure corners of Europe, many cooks came to realize that a great green salad should be exactly the sum of its parts.

The basic formula: Even the freshest greens are ruined by cheap oil, yet the priciest oils and vinegars cannot make up for wilted leaves.

*

Not least among the leaders of the greens revolution is Kenter Canyon Farms lettuce grower Andrea Crawford, the woman conceivably responsible for the current salad-in-a-bag phenomenon. Not only are bagged lettuces now available everywhere from discount warehouses to upscale grocery boutiques, the mix of greens has gotten more sophisticated, from mostly iceberg and carrot shreds to an increasingly diverse assortment of European-wanna-be mixtures of baby greens: mesclun.

When Crawford planted her first bed of lettuce, plastic-wrapped greens were the last thing she had on her mind. Even today, though she sells her greens in boxes (not bags) at one local supermarket, she’s not exactly a fan of the packaged stuff--in her view, loose is best.

All she really wanted when she first got into the salad business was to find a way to make a little money and still have enough time to raise kids.

“It was 1981,” says Crawford, sitting under a tree on the 16 acres of farmland in Agoura Hills where most of her lettuce is grown. “I’d been working at Chez Panisse with Alice Waters since about 1976--in those days the restaurant was much smaller, and everyone did everything. I made salad dressings and soups, I waited tables, I helped in the wine room and just sort of became part of the family. At the same time, I had a garden with some girlfriends of mine in North Berkeley, and it was one of those years when the weather was right, the garden was abundant and I had this new baby. I was so happy. It was the same summer that Alice was really getting famous--her first book had come out and she was busy entertaining everyone, racing into our garden at the last minute for lettuce or whatever to serve so and so from such and such.

*

“One day, I was sitting in the garden, bouncing Nathan on my knee, and Alice came by and said: ‘I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been taking so much lettuce lately, but I really need some more. Is it OK?’ I told her, ‘There’s way too much anyway--take whatever you need.’ ”

Then Waters said something that changed Crawford’s life.

“You know,” she told Crawford, “if you have too much, you can bring it to the restaurant and we could buy it.”

“It hit me then that this is what I could do to make money,” Crawford says. “I could have too much every day.”

At first, Crawford thought she might try to supply Waters with all sorts of vegetables, not just lettuce. But Berkeley is not a place of open spaces.

“I didn’t have a lot of land--we started off in Alice’s back yard--and lettuce was the one thing I could grow a lot of there,” Crawford says. “I developed a growing technique that was pretty different from anything you’d read in a textbook. I knew I was going to pick the lettuce young, that I’d keep the soil really rich, that the crops would turn over quickly and that the roots weren’t going to go very deep. I thought, well, we can really cram this lettuce in. Of course, when I ran this past other farmers they said, ‘No, you can’t do that; it will never work.’ They thought you needed to have space between the plants, which is sort of a traditional approach to farming. I just ignored them. I mean, I’d had the experience of crowding lettuce in and eating the thinnings. It worked beautifully.”

*

The California baby lettuce movement had begun.

Eventually Crawford acquired a whole half acre, and was able to supply Waters with lettuce for not only the formal downstairs restaurant, but also for the upstairs cafe and Waters’ nearby Cafe Fanny.

“It was all done by hand,” Crawford says. “We double-dug the beds; we made our own compost from restaurant garbage. It was a small operation, just me and an assistant.”

Four years later, the garden was running smoothly, but there was no way for Crawford to expand her business.

“I know this isn’t very businesslike,” Crawford says, “but I didn’t feel comfortable selling my product to any other restaurateur besides Alice. She was a close friend and she’d done so much for me by promoting the lettuce. I really felt I couldn’t maximize my potential in that city without irritating her.”

Meanwhile, a friend of Crawford’s had been after her to try her luck in Southern California. He’d even found a back yard in Venice where she could start out.

Crawford finally came down and had a look around. She liked what she saw.

*

“Essentially,” Crawford says, “I fell in love with L.A.--with all the open space, with the people we met, and with the incredible potential that exists in a town like this. Berkeley just didn’t have the same kind of opportunities.”

Crawford’s first order of business was to find a place to sell her lettuce. She went directly to Los Angeles’ most famous chef, Wolfgang Puck.

“I mailed off a letter to Wolfgang basically asking, ‘Are you interested in a lettuce garden like the one Alice has? And if you are, you have to send me $1,000 because I need the seed money to come down.’ Up until then, I was living the life of a student and didn’t have much to lose.

“Incredibly, Wolfgang called me the day he got the letter. And he sent me $1,000--he didn’t even know me. He was so easy about everything and I felt that he was very genuine. We didn’t sign a paper; we didn’t even shake hands. He just said that he would buy every box we had. I told him, ‘Well, you know, it’s going to cost you $50 a box.’ He said, ‘No problem.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I should have asked for $65.’ ”

Crawford left her Berkeley garden in the care of her sister Heidi, who still runs the Northern California business. Crawford herself got busy accumulating both land and business. She now supplies Southern California farmer’s markets, restaurants all over the country and one local supermarket chain, Bristol Farms. The lettuce is organically grown on land that includes acreage in Baja (for winter lettuce), Kenter Canyon Farms in Agoura Hills, and a patch of lettuce beds underneath some power lines in Tarzana.

*

With success, of course, came competition. “We knew it was a good idea that could be easily imitated--which, in fact, happened,” Crawford says.

Food lovers all over the country were learning that there was more to a green salad than iceberg and romaine--and that a green salad doesn’t even have to be green. Demand grew quickly.

Instead of experimenting with 100 varieties of exotic greens and charging $30 per pound for lettuce--prices that weren’t blinked at in the ‘80s--Crawford now grows a more economical 24 to 30 varieties at one time and her prices go as low as $6 per pound.

“I feel that I’ve accomplished my mission,” she says. “People are pretty well educated--they know arugula, frisee, radicchio. Baby lettuce is all around. But this is a business now.”

* SALAD-IN-A-BAG TASTE-OFF: How good is that lettuce in the plastic? See “Bag That Salad.”

*

Cover design by TRACY CROWE. Food styling by Donna Deane and Mayi Brady.