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When wild lettuce plants were first domesticated in the Caucasus 6,000 years ago, the crop was the seed, which could be pressed into oil. As cultivated plants migrated west through Egypt into Europe, the Greeks and Romans transformed them into salad leaves.

There are now hundreds of commercially grown varieties of lettuce, available all year round. But if you do grow them, you’ll probably be in the midst of your annual glut right now. And while lettuce is not difficult to give away – nobody hates it – in my experience it doesn’t make for a very exciting present.

Lettuce used to have a reputation as a nutritional blank slate, more water than anything else. It was also said to be one of those foods that burned more calories in the digesting than it provided in the eating (not true, by the way: there isn’t really such a thing as a negative-calorie vegetable). Perhaps it’s the idea that lettuce barely counts as food that accounts for it so often being used as a garnish, or even standing in for tableware: lettuce cups, lettuce bowls, lettuce plates, crisp lettuce leaves used like spoons for dipping.

In fact, lettuce is a good source of calcium and vitamins K, A, C and folate (a type of B vitamin), though the nutritional levels will vary considerably by type (romaine lettuce, for example, contains 10 times more vitamin A than iceberg).

Lettuce is so associated with salad that the two words are almost synonymous. We don’t say “lettuce salad” the way we say “rocket salad”; we take it for granted that lettuce will be in there somewhere.

But that’s certainly not all lettuce is good for – here are 17 delicious recipes for lettuce dishes, and not one of them is a salad.

You may not have thought it desirable, or even possible, to cook lettuce, but it’s actually a fairly common practice. Nigel Slater braises it with peas, leeks and ham. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall uses lettuce in a gratin baked with spring onions, double cream and bacon. Emily Scott’s little gem tart is more or less the same idea, with a puff pastry base instead of a breadcrumb topping.

Grilling lettuce on a barbecue is also popular. Tom Hunt treats lettuce as you might a hispi cabbage: chopped into wedges, dressed with oil and salt and charred on all sides. Yotam Ottolenghi does the same thing, slightly more elaborately, with heads of romaine lettuce split lengthwise, grilled and served with a salsa roja and a charred corn relish.

Lettuce also serves as the main ingredient in a range of soups. In its simplest form, lettuce soup can be made with just onion and potatoes. Its often paired with peas, as in Anna Jones’s romaine, pea and soft herb soup or Delia Smith’s lettuce, cucumber and pea soup. Either of these can be served chilled on a hot day, or heated through on a cold one.

Rachel Roddy offers up a broth containing butterhead lettuce parcels stuffed with cheese, egg, nuts and herbs, like dumplings. Romanian lettuce soup is a traditional dish with many minor variations, but this version from Christopher Kimball of Milk Street is a good synthesis: bacon, spring onions, garlic, dill and lettuce, thickened with a mixture of egg yolks and yoghurt.

Lettuce thoran is a Keralan stir-fry made with lettuce and coconut. If you don’t fancy heating lettuce, but still want something cooked, Rukmini Iyer’s lemongrass chicken lettuce wraps offer a hot meal in which the lettuce is not just an ingredient but a convenient handle. No forks necessary.

We all know that a fresh head of lettuce, properly stored, can outlast Liz Truss’s premiership, but most of us can end up regularly throwing away at least part of a wilted lettuce. It need not be so. Tom Hunt recommends using up any unwanted outer leaves by making a green mayonnaise. Likewise, this recipe for a romaine cream sauce calls for “12 damaged whole romaine lettuce leaves (old, torn and wilted is good)”.

A lettuce smoothie is another easy way to make use of any less photogenic leaves. (It is said that you can also revive a wilted lettuce by soaking it in hot – that’s right, hot – water.)

A recipe for lettuce panna cotta may sound like some kind of AI hallucination produced by random search terms, but this is an actual thing: pureed butterhead lettuce set with an infusion of lemon zest and sage, from chef Jenn Louis’s cookbook The Book of Greens.

Finally: I promised no salads, but this may count as one. Or it may not. One thing is certain: Alice Zaslavsky’s lettuce “cake” is not a cake. Instead, it’s a whole head of iceberg lettuce sliced into horizontal slabs and then reassembled in its original shape, using a dressing made from English mustard and condensed milk to sort of mortar it back together. Each layer is topped with grated hard-boiled egg and chopped chives, and then it’s served in sliced wedges, like a cake.

You can call that a salad if you want to, but for my money the word does not begin to cover it.