Photo: Schwäbin, CC BY-SA 3.0 de (via Wikimedia Commons)
Corn Salad
Valerianella locusta
Also known as Mâche, Lamb's Lettuce, Field Salad, Nut Lettuce
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Corn salad earned its name from its habit of springing up uninvited among European grain fields, a small green volunteer that farmers came to welcome rather than pull. Long before greenhouse lettuce, it was one of the few tender greens available through the cold months, gathered from the edges of winter fields when almost nothing else was growing. French cooks embraced it early and gave it the name mache, building whole winter salads around its soft, spoon-shaped leaves. It was valued less as medicine and more as sustenance, a small gift of green in a gray season.
How to grow & use it
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“When you want a tender, nutty green to carry a garden through the cold, quiet months.”
Corn salad was such a common volunteer weed in old European wheat and rye fields that it took its English name directly from the grain crop it grew alongside, not from maize, which had no presence in Europe until centuries later.
Corn salad is a safe, widely eaten culinary green with no significant cautions.