This article is part of our Cocktail Chatter series, where we dive into the wild, weird, and wondrous corners of history to share over a cocktail and impress your friends.
Ah, the wedge salad: a hunk of iceberg lettuce smothered with blue cheese, tomatoes, red onion, and bacon bits. It’s arguably one of the most popular salads in America, and can be found on steakhouse menus near and far. While the salad’s accouterments are the biggest pull, the specific lettuce itself is the hearty backbone of the dish, providing crunch and texture to the decadent pile. But the wedge salad’s ubiquitous lettuce wasn’t actually always called iceberg, and while its name has nothing to do with the Titanic, it still may have everything to do with long-haul transportation.
First cultivated in California in 1894, iceberg was originally called crisphead lettuce. And as the green is composed of nearly 96 percent water, crisphead lettuce was a perfect name to capture its essence. Still, this high water content didn’t contribute to the produce’s future freeze-adjacent title. Instead, the name is rumored to reference the way lettuce was once packed for cross-country transport: As iceberg was created before the age of modern refrigeration, farmers would pack their lettuce heads surrounded by heaps of crushed ice before loading the containers on trains for East Coast deliveries.
Salad greens company Fresh Express claims that its founder, produce farmer Bruce Church, was the first to coin the term iceberg lettuce. On its website, the brand asserts
