Now, when we were first married that would have been no problem, because salad dressing, in bottles, was not available in the markets anyway. Here we were with lots of fresh, green, leaf lettuce and no dressing to put on it. That leaf lettuce would not have been available either, except during the spring and early summer, and then only if you had your own garden.
The lack of salad dressing could have been quite serious, except that I remembered that we used to use vinegar and sugar on leaf lettuce, so I gave my lettuce a generous treatment of those two ingredients, and it sure did taste good. It also reminded me of some of the other events of our early days of marriage, and that was more than sixty years ago.
We didn’t have a garden, where we lived, because we were in an apartment. However, Louise’s Dad let us use a small section of their garden plot, and in it we had lettuce, carrots, radishes, tomatoes and most every thing else that could be grown in a small area. Bear in mind that very few of those things were otherwise available, except if a huckster, like Old Martin Verheul, happened to come by your house with his wagon load of vegetables and two unruly boys.
I should have written this back there when I was talking about beer at three bottles a quarter and Dal Ponte’s Store, down in Second Ward. However, as I have explained before, if you don’t like the way things are arranged, you will just have to arrange them yourself. When we returned to Florida this past Fall (1993), we as always made a couple of quick shopping trips to the grocery markets but, also as usual, we forgot to get some of the things that are almost impossible to get along without. One of the very important things that we forgot was Salad Dressing.