Valerianella locusta is a small annual plant that is eaten as a leaf vegetable. It has a characteristic nutty flavour, dark green colour, and soft texture, and is popularly served as salad greens. Common names include corn salad, common cornsalad, lamb's lettuce, mâche(/mɑːʃ/), fetticus, feldsalat, nut lettuce, field salad. In restaurants that feature French cooking, it may be called doucette or raiponce, as an alternative to mâche, by which it is best known. In German-speaking Switzerland it is known as Nüsslisalat or Nüssler, terms that have been borrowed by the area's many English speakers. It is typically served as a salad with chopped hard-boiled eggs and crumbled bacon.

 

 

Corn salad grows in a low rosette with spatulate leaves up to 6 inches long. It is a hardy plant that grows to zone 5, and in mild climates it is grown as a winter green.

 

In warm conditions it tends to bolt to seed,[6] producing much-branched stems with clusters (cymes) of flowers. The flowers have a bluish-white corolla of five fused petals, 1.5 to 2 mm (0.06 to 0.08 in) long and wide, and three stamens. Underneath the flowers is a whorl of bracts. Fertilized flowers produce achenes with 2 sterile chambers and one fertile chamber

 

Distribution and habitat

 

Corn salad grows wild in parts of Europe, northern Africa and western Asia. In Europe and Asia it is a common weed in cultivated land and waste spaces. In North America it has escaped cultivation and become naturalized on both the eastern and western seaboards.

 

As a cultivated crop, it is a specialty of the region around Nantes, France, which is the primary producer of mâche in Europe.