Know Your Lettuces

The familiar lettuces--iceberg, butter, oakleaf, romaine and the rest--are strains of a single species, Lactuca sativa, which belongs to the same family as a number of flowers (daisy, marigold, chrysanthemum) and also tarragon and artichoke. Lettuce is one of the few plants so thoroughly domesticated it’s not found in the wild. It’s such a salad staple that in a number of languages, such as Polish, the word for lettuce is actually “salata.”

But the foodie revolution has thrown all sorts of new “lettuces” on our plates, and a lot of people are a little vague about who’s who. Here’s a quick guide.

Ma^che has round-ended leaves with a mild flavor; it has a traditional English name, lamb’s lettuce, but nobody cares these days. It’s also been called corn salad, because it grows readily in fields sown with wheat (which is known as “corn” in England). Botanically, it belongs to the same family as the garden flower heliotrope.

By contrast, arugula belongs to the cabbage/mustard family, which explains the sharp, peppery flavor it shares with cousins such as mustard greens and watercress. Its traditional English name is rocket, but, again, nobody cares.

And then there are the maddeningly named members of the genus Chicorium, which are known as either endive or chicory with no particular rhyme or reason.

C. intybum, also known just as chicory, takes the forms of Belgian endive and the red “lettuce” known as radicchio.

To another species of the same genus, C. endivia (tiresomely, “endivia” is just a form of the word “intybum”), belongs the fashionable frisee (short for chicoree frisee, which is called in English, natch, curly endive). And then there’s escarole, a sort of frisee which isn’t curly . . . so nobody much cares.