The Brown Derby is perhaps the most well known of all the iconic restaurants of old Hollywood. Partly due to Lucille Ball and the famous scene between her and the actor William Holden in the I Love Lucy television series of the 1950s.

So, naturally when I am in Panama presenting recipes from classic Hollywood restaurants to Boquete Gourmet I want to include a recipe from this restaurant. It should be fairly easy for me too, because I own the old cookbook from Marjorie Child Husted, The Brown Derby Cookbook. But in flipping through this book I can see one thing right off the bat. Our styles in eating have changed drastically since the era of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It's hard to imagine Brad Pitt or Halle Berry sitting down to some of the dishes featured in this book. The food is both fussy and simplistic if that's possible. I mean many of the dishes call for pastry cream and elaborately turned (but grossed overcooked) vegetables. But they are simple in the fact that they are not much more creative than some sort of meat and potatoes presentation with a cream sauce.

The book is interesting from a historical perspective but I don't really want to cook anything from this book.

Aren't we foodies a funny bunch?

It was not that long ago when baby field greens came into our sightline. What a revelation they were to people like us!

The mesclun salad was born and it stormed our palates. It made all the other types of lettuce seem brutish. But now I look at those emaciated, limp little leaves and I find myself thinking. Is that all there is?

These greens were exciting when they were new. They were difficult to find too far from the fields of which they were harvested. That's because they were difficult to store & transport.

We loved them and we let them take over our salad plates. Not just because they were new, but also because by their very nature they had to be eaten at their freshest and most flavorful.