All About Salads
If you think about it, the salad has finally come into its own: no longer a last-minute bowl of greens or a composition of canned fruits or vegetables, the salad has its own hardware: the salad bowl, the salad tongs, lettuce spinners, choppers, and special salad dressing dispensers, to name a few items. And it even takes center stage at most supermarkets, where salad bars display a wide range of greens and salad extras.
Indeed, the salad should often be a main player in vegetarian meals. Winifred Gibbs, in the 1912 Economical Cooking cookbook, advised her readers, “As a matter of fact, a salad should be an ordinary dish served as often as possible rather than an uncommon one.”
History of Salads
Food historians tell us that ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed a bowl of mixed greens at mealtimes, lightly dressing them with oil, vinegar, and salt—hence, the word salad, a derivative of the Latin word for salt, sal. But apparently the salad’s history actually stems from a time thousands of years further back, when greens as salads graced dinner tables in the Mediterranean region long before Roman times.
While salads may have slipped into obscurity for several centuries during the Dark Ages and beyond, these bowls of greens once again became mealtime favorites when the Renaissance age began in the fourteenth century. By then, European cooks had learned to fill out the salad bowl with other ingredients, from eggs to cooked vegetables, and much more.
Of course, the salad took on other forms as well: the Dutch refined the coleslaw concept; Germans delighted in warm dressed potatoes; the Tuscans elevated the bread salad, the panzanella, into a tomato delight with tomatoes and sliced or cubed bread; and early Americans heaped fruits together in a bowl and called the result “ambrosia” and later, “fruit cocktail.”
Fact
Strange salads—or at least what modern cooks might question—have made their way to the table, such as a 1920s American salad of cottage cheese flavored with ketchup, rolled into balls and served on watercress; and from New Zealand in decades past, the salad of cream cheese rolled in grated carrots.
Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century, when salads took steps forward in the American menu. By that time, the chef’s salad, originated probably by chef Louis Diat at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City, had its imitators. The much-loved Cobb salad likely hails from Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant, where its original owner, Mr. Robert Cobb, reputedly whipped it up from leftovers ones night.
The ubiquitous Caesar Salad, probably created by Italian-born Caesare Cardini in his Tijuana, Mexico, restaurant in the 1920s, launched itself onto the public’s most-loved salad list. Today, you can scarcely find an American restaurant without a chef’s take on the Caesar salad.
At the end of the twentieth and on into the twenty-first centuries, salads have become designer creations, often on upscale restaurant menus as compellingly beautiful as the main course itself. The inventive chef turns to a wide-ranging palate of colors and a broad spectrum of textures to turn the once-simple bowl of crisp greens into a fanciful dish. But despite all the frills, lettuce generally remains the salad bowl basic.
