Lactuca sativa (cultivated lettuce), domesticated from Lactuca serriola (wild or prickly lettuce); cultivated chiefly as romaine or cos (var. longifolia), butterhead and crisphead (var. capitata), looseleaf (var. crispa), and the Chinese stem lettuce or celtuce (var. angustana)
Origin: The eastern Mediterranean and the Nile Valley of Egypt, where wild prickly lettuce (<em>Lactuca serriola</em>) was first taken into cultivation
Lettuce is the great paradox of the kitchen garden: the most ubiquitous salad plant on earth, eaten raw and cold by the tonne, descends from a tall, bitter, prickly roadside weed that no one in their right mind would eat. The cultivated lettuce, Lactuca sativa, is a member of the daisy and sunflower family, the Asteraceae, and it was bred from the wild prickly lettuce, Lactuca serriola, a coarse plant of disturbed Mediterranean and Near Eastern ground whose leaves bristle with spines along the midrib and whose every cut surface bleeds a bitter white latex. The two will still cross freely, and the wild plant grows as a weed in the very fields where its cultivated child is raised.
The original attraction was almost certainly not the leaf at all but the seed and the stem. The earliest clear evidence of cultivation comes from Old Kingdom Egypt, where wall paintings of around 2680 BCE show a tall, upright lettuce with a thick stem and narrow leaves, grown both for the oil pressed from its seeds and as a sacred plant of the fertility god Min. From that erect, stem-forming ancestor the whole family of lettuces would be bred, the long centuries of selection working to suppress the bitterness, the spines, and the milky latex, to delay the bolting to seed that turns a lettuce woody and acrid, and to swell first the leaves and then, in one branch, the stem.
Unlike the plum or the bean, lettuce was domesticated only once, and it remains a single species; its bewildering variety is the work of the cultivator's hand rather than of separate wild origins. Four great forms grew out of the one plant, and each became the staple of a different cuisine. The oldest is the romaine or cos (var. longifolia), the tall, upright, sweet-hearted lettuce that descends most directly from the Egyptian original and carries the name of the Greek island of Kos. From it the cultivators of Europe bred the soft, loosely folded butterhead and, later still, the tight, pale, intensely crisp crisphead or iceberg (both gathered under var. capitata), and the open, non-hearting looseleaf lettuces (var. crispa) in their reds and greens and frills. At the eastern end of the plant's long journey, in China, selection ran in a wholly different direction, swelling not the leaves but the stem into the thick, crunchy, jade-green celtuce or stem lettuce (var. angustana), and so returning, by a curious circle, to something close to the stem vegetable of ancient Egypt.
Lettuce travelled out of its Near Eastern and Egyptian homeland in two directions, and along the way each branch of the family settled into the cuisine that would make it a staple.
The western and Mediterranean stream is the older and the better documented. From the sacred gardens of Egypt the upright stem lettuce passed to the Greeks, who grew it on Kos and across the Aegean, gave the cos lettuce its lasting name, and wove it into both medicine and myth. Rome received it with enthusiasm: the Romans named it lactuca for its milky latex, served it to open the banquet as an appetite-whetter, and prized its reputation as a bringer of sleep. From Rome the lettuce spread through the orchards and potagers of medieval and early modern Europe, and it was above all in France that the soft butterhead and the art of the dressed green salad reached their height, in the kitchen gardens of Paris and the great potager du roi laid out for Louis XIV at Versailles. Carried across the Atlantic by European colonists, the lettuce found in California a climate and an industry that would transform it: in the Salinas Valley, the 'Salad Bowl of the World', the crisp, heat-tolerant iceberg was perfected and, packed under crushed ice for the long rail journey east, gave the crisphead its modern name. The romaine line came to its most famous moment just over the border, in Tijuana, where in 1924 the Italian-born restaurateur Cesare Cardini tossed the first Caesar salad.
The eastern stream carried lettuce out of the same Near Eastern homeland into Persia, where the sweet romaine, the kahu, became the centrepiece of the summer refreshment kahoo sekanjabin, dipped leaf by leaf into a syrup of mint and vinegar. From Persia the plant travelled the Silk Road eastward to reach Tang China, where the cultivators did something done nowhere else: they bred the lettuce for its stem, creating the celtuce, and at the same time made the leaf lettuce a beloved stir-fried green whose name, shengcai, puns so neatly on the words for 'growing wealth' that no Chinese New Year table is complete without it. From China lettuce passed to Korea, where it became the indispensable wrapping leaf of the ssam, and southward into Vietnam, where it joined the great raw-herb plate, the rau sống, set beside every grilled and rolled dish.
Lettuce is now one of the most widely grown vegetables on earth, and the geography of its production has been quietly reordered. China is by a wide margin the world's largest grower, raising more than half of the global crop, much of it the stem lettuce or celtuce that is little known in the West but a true staple of the Chinese table, eaten stir-fried, pickled, and cold-dressed. After China come the United States and Spain, whose Californian and Murcian fields supply the salad lettuces of the whole Western world; California's Salinas Valley alone earns its old title as the Salad Bowl of the World.
The plant keeps its four culinary identities largely distinct. The romaine or cos, sweet and upright, is the lettuce of the Greek maroulosalata, the Persian kahoo sekanjabin, and, above all, the Caesar salad, the single most imitated salad in the world. The butterhead, soft and yielding, is the salad and braising lettuce of France, melted into petits pois à la française and folded into the gentle potage de laitue. The crisphead or iceberg, crunchy and watery and durable, is the American lettuce of the wedge salad, the Cobb, and the BLT, where its crispness is the entire point. The looseleaf lettuces fill the salad bowls and sandwich shops of the world. And the Chinese stem lettuce stands somewhat apart, grown for its peeled, crisp, faintly sweet stem rather than its leaves. Across East and South-East Asia the leaf is also a vessel and a wrapper: the cool, raw lettuce leaf folded around grilled meat and rice in the Korean ssam, cupped around minced pork in the Cantonese san choy bau, and laid amongst the herbs of the Vietnamese table. Few plants travel so easily between the salad bowl, the wok, and the wrapping hand.
Historical Journey of Lettuce
Nile Valley, Old Kingdom Egypt — c. 2680 BCE
In the gardens of Old Kingdom Egypt the wild prickly lettuce, Lactuca serriola, a bitter, spiny weed of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern margins, was first taken into cultivation and turned into something new. The earliest images, painted on tomb walls around 2680 BCE, show not the leafy rosette of the modern salad but a tall, upright plant with a thick stem and long, narrow leaves, grown for the oil pressed from its abundant seeds and, above all, as the sacred plant of Min, the Egyptian god of fertility and generation. Min was shown with beds of these towering lettuces beside him, and the plant was carried in his festivals and eaten as an aphrodisiac, its erect stem and its milky white latex read as emblems of virility. From this stem-forming Egyptian ancestor the whole vast family of cultivated lettuces would descend, the long work of selection gradually softening the bitterness and the spines and lengthening the sweet, upright head that would become the romaine. The Egyptians eat the romaine still, as khass, the everyday green of the salad bowl, a customary plant of the spring festival of Sham El-Nessim, and the crisp scoop for a bowl of lemony tahina, so that the oldest lettuce land on earth remains a lettuce-eating one.
The Greeks took the Egyptian lettuce and gave it both a name that endures and a place in their medicine and their myth. The upright, sweet-stemmed lettuce was grown across the Aegean and, by long tradition, especially on the island of Kos, whose name the cos lettuce still carries across the world. Greek physicians from Hippocrates onward prescribed it as a cooling, calming food, and Dioscorides catalogued its varieties and its sleep-bringing latex. Yet the Greeks also wove the lettuce into a darker story than the fertile Egyptians had: in the myth of Adonis, the goddess Aphrodite laid the dying youth upon a bed of lettuce, and so the plant became associated with funerals, with the swift-withering 'gardens of Adonis' grown only to die, and with a reputation for cooling the ardour it had stoked on the Nile. For all that, the lettuce settled firmly into the Greek table, where it remains the everyday salad green: the maroulosalata, a heap of finely shredded romaine dressed simply with spring onion, dill, good olive oil, and lemon, is one of the defining salads of the Greek spring and the Easter table.
Rome adopted the lettuce wholeheartedly and gave it the name it still bears in the sciences, lactuca, from lac, milk, for the white latex that wells from its cut stems. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History in the first century, described a whole catalogue of cultivated lettuces in Roman gardens, distinguishing them by leaf, colour, and season. The Romans served lettuce at the very start of the meal, as a stimulant to the appetite, until the emperor Domitian, by one famous account, took to serving it as a first course precisely to torment his guests, since custom held that lettuce belonged at the end of dinner, to settle the stomach and induce sleep; Galen, the great physician, confessed that in old age he ate lettuce at night to help him rest. From the Roman table the lettuce spread through the gardens of the empire and into the cooking of the Italian peninsula, where it endures in dishes far removed from the raw salad: above all in the Ligurian lattughe ripiene in brodo, whole lettuce leaves wrapped around a delicate stuffing of veal, herbs, egg, and Parmesan and gently poached in a clear meat broth, a frugal and elegant dish of the Genoese kitchen.
Carried east from its Near Eastern homeland rather than from Rome, the sweet romaine lettuce, the kahu, became one of the great summer pleasures of the Persian table. Persian cooking is built upon a refined balance of sweet, sour, and cooling, and lettuce found its place at the heart of the most beloved hot-weather refreshment in the country: kahoo sekanjabin. Sekanjabin is one of the oldest preparations in the Persian repertoire, an oxymel of sugar or honey boiled down with vinegar and steeped with fresh mint until it sets to a clear, fragrant syrup; whole crisp leaves of romaine are then dipped, leaf by leaf, into the chilled syrup and eaten with the fingers, the sweet-sour mint playing against the cool, faintly bitter crunch of the lettuce. Served on the hottest afternoons and at the breaking of the summer fast, it is at once a salad, a dip, and a dessert, and it remains a fixture of the Iranian summer to this day. From Persia the cultivation of lettuce continued its long journey eastward along the Silk Road towards China.
Lettuce reached China along the Silk Road by the early Tang dynasty, and there the cultivators did something done nowhere else in the world: instead of breeding the plant for its leaf, they bred it for its stem, swelling the bolting stalk into the thick, pale-green, crisp celtuce or stem lettuce (var. angustana), known in Chinese as woju or wosun. Peeled of its fibrous skin, the stem is sliced and stir-fried, cold-dressed with chilli oil and Sichuan pepper, or pickled, prized for a clean, juicy crunch quite unlike any leaf. The leaf lettuce was not neglected: shengcai, the 'raw vegetable', became one of the most popular of all Chinese greens, flash stir-fried whole or halved and finished with oyster sauce in the Cantonese kitchen, where its name turned it into a talisman of fortune, for shengcai sounds almost exactly like the phrase for 'growing wealth', and a head of lettuce is fed to the dancing lion at the New Year. The Cantonese also made the crisp leaf a cup and a wrapper, filling it with savoury minced meat in the dish the West knows as san choy bau. China is today the largest producer of lettuce on earth, and the only great cuisine in which the stem, not the leaf, is the prize.
Lettuce came to Korea from China, and the Koreans made it, above all other vegetables, the leaf of the wrap. Sangchu, the soft red and green leaf lettuce, is the heart of ssam, the great Korean tradition of wrapping a bite of grilled meat, a little rice, a smear of the fermented bean-and-chilli paste ssamjang, and a sliver of raw garlic or chilli into a cool, crisp leaf and eating it whole in a single mouthful. So prized was Korean lettuce that a Yuan-dynasty Chinese source recorded the lettuce grown by Korean palace women as cheon-geum-chae, the 'thousand-gold vegetable', for the high price its seed commanded. Beyond the wrap, the Koreans dress the torn leaf into sangchu geotjeori, a quick, unfermented 'fresh kimchi' salad seasoned with the chilli flake gochugaru, garlic, toasted sesame, and sesame oil, served as a sharp, bright banchan alongside grilled meat and rice. The lettuce wrap is so embedded in the Korean table that no barbecue, from the humblest to the most lavish, is set without a heaped plate of washed sangchu leaves at its centre.
It was in France that the soft butterhead lettuce, the laitue beurre, and the whole art of the dressed and cooked lettuce reached their highest refinement. French market gardeners bred the tender, loosely folded butterheads and the small, sweet Little Gems, and the royal kitchen garden, the great potager du roi laid out by Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie for Louis XIV at Versailles in the 1670s, raised lettuces under glass and in frames to supply the court the year round. The French treated lettuce not only as a salad but as a vegetable to be cooked: shredded and braised slowly in butter, it melts into petits pois à la française, the classic dish of young peas stewed with lettuce and tiny spring onions; simmered with stock and a little cream, it becomes the gentle, pale-green potage de laitue, the thrifty soup of the gardener with more lettuces than the table can eat raw; and braised whole in their own juices, laitues braisées make an elegant side to roast meats. The lettuce is the foundation, too, of the composed salads of the south, among them the salade niçoise of Nice, arranged upon a bed of small lettuce leaves.
Lettuce entered Vietnam through the long Chinese influence on the northern kitchen and, later, through the salad lettuces brought by French traders and colonists, whose word for salad survives in the Vietnamese name for the leaf, xà lách. It settled at once into the most characteristic feature of the Vietnamese table: the rau sống, the great communal plate of raw leaves and herbs set down beside almost every grilled, fried, and rolled dish, into which soft lettuce is torn and mingled with mint, perilla, coriander, and basil. The diner tears a lettuce leaf, piles it with herbs and a morsel of hot food, and wraps and eats it by hand. In the gỏi cuốn, the fresh summer roll, lettuce is rolled with prawn, pork, herbs, and vermicelli inside a translucent sheet of rice paper; in bún chả, the great grilled-pork-and-noodle dish of Hanoi, the lettuce and herb plate is not a garnish but half the meal, the cool leaf wrapped around the smoky pork and dipped into the sweet-sour broth. Across Vietnam the raw lettuce leaf is less a salad than an edible utensil, the cool, fresh counterweight that defines the balance of the whole cuisine.
Salinas Valley, California, United States — c. 1900 CE
European colonists carried the salad lettuces of England and France to North America, but it was in California that lettuce was remade into an industry and a new variety conquered the table. In the long, cool, irrigated valleys of the state, above all the Salinas Valley that still calls itself the Salad Bowl of the World, growers perfected the crisphead lettuce, a tight, pale, intensely crunchy and watery head that could withstand long-distance transport as no soft lettuce could. Packed into rail cars under heaps of crushed ice for the journey to the cities of the east, it acquired the name by which the whole crisphead class is now known: the iceberg. Cheap, durable, and reliably crisp, iceberg became the defining lettuce of twentieth-century America and the backbone of its great salads and sandwiches. It is the cold, crunchy quarter of the steakhouse wedge salad, blanketed in blue-cheese dressing and bacon; the finely chopped bed of the Cobb salad, invented at the Brown Derby in Hollywood; and the crisp, cool 'L' of the BLT, the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich whose very name enshrines the leaf. California's fields, and the refrigerated supply chain built around them, made lettuce a year-round staple of the entire continent.
The most famous lettuce dish in the world was born just across the border from the Californian fields, in the bustling Prohibition-era resort of Tijuana. On the Independence Day weekend of 1924, the Italian-born restaurateur Cesare Cardini, whose dining room drew thirsty Americans down from San Diego in the dry years of Prohibition, found himself short of supplies after an unexpected rush and improvised a salad from what was left in the kitchen: whole leaves of crisp romaine, the sweet upright lettuce descended in a direct line from the cos of ancient Kos, dressed with garlic, coddled egg, lemon, Worcestershire sauce, olive oil, and Parmesan, and tossed dramatically at the table to be eaten with the fingers. The Caesar salad was an immediate sensation, carried back across the border by the Hollywood crowd and copied, and corrupted, in every corner of the globe. That the world's defining salad should rest upon the romaine leaf is a fitting end to the lettuce's long western journey: the variety bred first in the gardens of the pharaohs, named for a Greek island and a Roman city, reaching its most celebrated moment on a Mexican table within sight of the greatest lettuce fields on earth.
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Journey Point Map Key
Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
c. 1924 CETijuana, Mexico
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Lettuce
Lactuca sativa (cultivated lettuce), domesticated from Lactuca serriola (wild or prickly lettuce); cultivated chiefly as romaine or cos (var. longifolia), butterhead and crisphead (var. capitata), looseleaf (var. crispa), and the Chinese stem lettuce or celtuce (var. angustana)
VegetablesAsteraceae
🌍Origin
The eastern Mediterranean and the Nile Valley of Egypt, where wild prickly lettuce (Lactuca serriola) was first taken into cultivation — c. 2680 BCE (Old Kingdom Egypt, where the tall stem lettuce is first depicted)
🌱Domestication
Lettuce is the great paradox of the kitchen garden: the most ubiquitous salad plant on earth, eaten raw and cold by the tonne, descends from a tall, bitter, prickly roadside weed that no one in their right mind would eat. The cultivated lettuce, Lactuca sativa, is a member of the daisy and sunflower family, the Asteraceae, and it was bred from the wild prickly lettuce, Lactuca serriola, a coarse plant of disturbed Mediterranean and Near Eastern ground whose leaves bristle with spines along the midrib and whose every cut surface bleeds a bitter white latex. The two will still cross freely, and the wild plant grows as a weed in the very fields where its cultivated child is raised.
The original attraction was almost certainly not the leaf at all but the seed and the stem. The earliest clear evidence of cultivation comes from Old Kingdom Egypt, where wall paintings of around 2680 BCE show a tall, upright lettuce with a thick stem and narrow leaves, grown both for the oil pressed from its seeds and as a sacred plant of the fertility god Min. From that erect, stem-forming ancestor the whole family of lettuces would be bred, the long centuries of selection working to suppress the bitterness, the spines, and the milky latex, to delay the bolting to seed that turns a lettuce woody and acrid, and to swell first the leaves and then, in one branch, the stem.
Unlike the plum or the bean, lettuce was domesticated only once, and it remains a single species; its bewildering variety is the work of the cultivator's hand rather than of separate wild origins. Four great forms grew out of the one plant, and each became the staple of a different cuisine. The oldest is the romaine or cos (var. longifolia), the tall, upright, sweet-hearted lettuce that descends most directly from the Egyptian original and carries the name of the Greek island of Kos. From it the cultivators of Europe bred the soft, loosely folded butterhead and, later still, the tight, pale, intensely crisp crisphead or iceberg (both gathered under var. capitata), and the open, non-hearting looseleaf lettuces (var. crispa) in their reds and greens and frills. At the eastern end of the plant's long journey, in China, selection ran in a wholly different direction, swelling not the leaves but the stem into the thick, crunchy, jade-green celtuce or stem lettuce (var. angustana), and so returning, by a curious circle, to something close to the stem vegetable of ancient Egypt.
⛵Global Voyage
Lettuce travelled out of its Near Eastern and Egyptian homeland in two directions, and along the way each branch of the family settled into the cuisine that would make it a staple.
The western and Mediterranean stream is the older and the better documented. From the sacred gardens of Egypt the upright stem lettuce passed to the Greeks, who grew it on Kos and across the Aegean, gave the cos lettuce its lasting name, and wove it into both medicine and myth. Rome received it with enthusiasm: the Romans named it lactuca for its milky latex, served it to open the banquet as an appetite-whetter, and prized its reputation as a bringer of sleep. From Rome the lettuce spread through the orchards and potagers of medieval and early modern Europe, and it was above all in France that the soft butterhead and the art of the dressed green salad reached their height, in the kitchen gardens of Paris and the great potager du roi laid out for Louis XIV at Versailles. Carried across the Atlantic by European colonists, the lettuce found in California a climate and an industry that would transform it: in the Salinas Valley, the 'Salad Bowl of the World', the crisp, heat-tolerant iceberg was perfected and, packed under crushed ice for the long rail journey east, gave the crisphead its modern name. The romaine line came to its most famous moment just over the border, in Tijuana, where in 1924 the Italian-born restaurateur Cesare Cardini tossed the first Caesar salad.
The eastern stream carried lettuce out of the same Near Eastern homeland into Persia, where the sweet romaine, the kahu, became the centrepiece of the summer refreshment kahoo sekanjabin, dipped leaf by leaf into a syrup of mint and vinegar. From Persia the plant travelled the Silk Road eastward to reach Tang China, where the cultivators did something done nowhere else: they bred the lettuce for its stem, creating the celtuce, and at the same time made the leaf lettuce a beloved stir-fried green whose name, shengcai, puns so neatly on the words for 'growing wealth' that no Chinese New Year table is complete without it. From China lettuce passed to Korea, where it became the indispensable wrapping leaf of the ssam, and southward into Vietnam, where it joined the great raw-herb plate, the rau sống, set beside every grilled and rolled dish.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
Lettuce is now one of the most widely grown vegetables on earth, and the geography of its production has been quietly reordered. China is by a wide margin the world's largest grower, raising more than half of the global crop, much of it the stem lettuce or celtuce that is little known in the West but a true staple of the Chinese table, eaten stir-fried, pickled, and cold-dressed. After China come the United States and Spain, whose Californian and Murcian fields supply the salad lettuces of the whole Western world; California's Salinas Valley alone earns its old title as the Salad Bowl of the World.
The plant keeps its four culinary identities largely distinct. The romaine or cos, sweet and upright, is the lettuce of the Greek maroulosalata, the Persian kahoo sekanjabin, and, above all, the Caesar salad, the single most imitated salad in the world. The butterhead, soft and yielding, is the salad and braising lettuce of France, melted into petits pois à la française and folded into the gentle potage de laitue. The crisphead or iceberg, crunchy and watery and durable, is the American lettuce of the wedge salad, the Cobb, and the BLT, where its crispness is the entire point. The looseleaf lettuces fill the salad bowls and sandwich shops of the world. And the Chinese stem lettuce stands somewhat apart, grown for its peeled, crisp, faintly sweet stem rather than its leaves. Across East and South-East Asia the leaf is also a vessel and a wrapper: the cool, raw lettuce leaf folded around grilled meat and rice in the Korean ssam, cupped around minced pork in the Cantonese san choy bau, and laid amongst the herbs of the Vietnamese table. Few plants travel so easily between the salad bowl, the wok, and the wrapping hand.
