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Whence Came the Salad?
by Karan Davis Cutler
The Spanish proverb advises that it takes four persons to make a salad: a spendthrift to measure the oil, a miser the vinegar, a counselor the salt and a madman to stir it all up. In fact, it takes one more: a gardener to grow the vegetables. However good the dressing, produce fresh from the garden is the heart of a great salad.
While eating uncooked vegetables—the definition of salad used for this book—is more fashionable than ever, it isn't new. The poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) wrote an ode to the salad (the word comes from the Latin for salt, sal, a derivation originating with the Roman practice of eating greens that had been dipped in salt). Despite its ancient roots, the salad fell out of favor for centuries. Suspicion of and indifference to raw vegetables was rampant. The kitchen notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), which are crammed with recipes for shoulder of serpent, pierced pigs' ears, cockscombs, trouts' intestines and leg of loon (as well as information about "Ridding your Kitchen of Pestilential Flies" and "An Alternative to Filthy Tablecloths"), give short shrift to uncooked vegetables. Da Vinci acknowledges that his cook Battista is fond of "serving me with unwashed lettuce...and this I normally give to my dog if I can without Battista seeing me."
Slowly, however, vegetables were rescued from serving solely as potherbs. The earliest English salad recipe, which dates from about 1390, is for a mixture of herbs, greens, onions and leeks. "Pick them, pluck them small with thine hand and mingle them well with raw oil. Lay on vinegar and salt and serve it forth." Elizabethans were more adventuresome, topping herbs and greens, such as lettuce, purslane, sorrel, dandelion, mustard, cress, turnip and radish greens, spinach, chicory and chives, with flowers, petals of violets, borage, primroses, gilliflowers and especially nasturtiums, a new import from the West Indies. In 1699, came John Evelyn's Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets. Evelyn gave growers their due when he noted that "sallets in general consist of certain Esculent Plants and Herbs, improv'd by Culture, Industry and Art of the Gard'ner...."
Yet doubts about uncooked vegetables ran deep—tomatoes were still believed to be toxic as late at 1820, when Robert Johnson gobbled up a basketful on the steps of the Salem, New Jersey, courthouse with no immediate ill effects and settled the controversy once and for all. Forty-five years later, in the second edition of The Field and Garden Vegetables of America, New England horticulturist Fearing Burr not only listed 35 tomatoes, including long-lost names like 'Lester's Perfected' and 'The Cook's Favorite', but also a farmful of available salad plants, including nine varieties of chicory, 38 Romaine lettuces, 55 cucumbers, 22 endives, 46 kales, 19 parsleys, 49 radishes, 13 spinaches and 13 Swiss chards.
Although we often think of it as an invention of the late-20th century, the main-course salad emerged more than 80 years ago, promoted in women's magazines as a healthy alternative to traditional menus. "Instead of paying $2 a bottle for Dr. Whoosis Bitters for rheumatism..., we prefer to buy our blood purifiers at the vegetable stand and salad counter," one enthusiast explained in 1928. Most Americans were confirmed salad eaters by the end of World War II, due to a serendipitous conjunction of a heightened interest in health and nutrition, better methods of transportation and storage and the innovative work of plant breeders and seed importers. Today, there are hundreds of lettuces and tomatoes, scores of cucumbers, peppers, radishes and spinaches, dozens of cabbages and scallions. This wealth of cultivars, heirlooms and hybrids, is only as far away as a good seed catalog.
Only one nagging question remains about salads—before or after the main course? Interestingly, that debate is nearly as old as the salad itself. The Greeks, believing that lettuce cooled the body, argued that it should be eaten after the meal to offset the drinking to follow. The Romans followed this pattern (fittingly, when Adonis dies, Venus throws herself on a bed of lettuce to cool her ardor), but only until the first century A.D., when they moved the salad course to before the meal, so that it would offset the alcohol consumed during dinner.
It's been back and forth ever since. In 1597, the English herbalist John Gerard reported that the salad was "served in these daies, and in these countries in the beginning of supper, and eaten first before any other meat...." But in England and Europe today, the salad appears after the main course, a palate-clearing prelude to dessert; in North America, we take our salad first, a simple course to stir the appetite.
But if you grow your own salads, you'll likely follow Gerard's second bit of advice on the subject. "Now and then," he writes, it may "be eaten at both those times to the health of the body."
Karan Davis Cutler, guest editor for Salad Gardens, is the managing editor of Harrowsmith Country Life magazine. She wages a never-ending battle with Vermont's stoney soil.