Supplemental Information

  • What Is Salad

  • Types of Salads

  • Types Of Ingredients Used In Salads

  • Salad Dressing

  • Toppings Used As Garnishes

    • Recipes

  • Balsamic Vinegarette

  • Chef Salad

  • Classic Caesar Salad

  • Fruity Garden Salad

  • Greek Salad Dressing

  • Raspberry Vinaigrette

    • Salad Recipes

    Recipes and Tips for making Salad.

    What is Salad?

    Salad is any of a wide variety of dishes including: vegetable salads; salads of pasta, legumes, eggs, or grains; mixed salads incorporating meat, poultry, or seafood; and fruit salads  They may include a mixture of cold and hot, often including raw vegetables or fruits.

    Green salads include leaf lettuce and leafy vegetables with a sauce or dressing. Other salads are based on pasta, noodles, or gelatin. Most salads are traditionally served cold, although some, such as south German potato salad, are served warm.

    If possible, salads should be made entirely of raw vegetables and raw fruits. The chief salad vegetables are celery, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, onions and garlic, the two last mentioned being used for flavoring.

    Raw onions are too irritating to use in large quantities, and the same is true of garlic. The best salads contain but two or three ingredients. Take any two of the vegetables mentioned, such as lettuce and tomatoes; lettuce and cucumbers; cabbage and celery; celery and tomatoes, or eat simply one of these green vegetables raw. It is a good thing to eat some of those salad vegetables daily. If your digestion is excellent, you may occasionally take raw carrots or turnips, and a few raw spinach leaves are tasty for a change. Never mind if people tease you about eating grass, for it helps you to keep well.

    Dress the raw vegetables as your taste allows. Most people want some salt, or salt and lemon juice, or a little sugar, or cream, or salt and olive oil, or salt, olive oil and lemon juice, or mayonnaise on their salad vegetables. Some eat them without any dressing and the flavor is excellent. Tasty salad can be made of fruit and vegetables, using no dressing, but strewing some nuts over the dish. On warm days, such a salad makes a satisfactory lunch.

    It is all right to make a fruit and vegetable salad. Instead of using tomatoes, take strawberries, apples, grapes, or any other acid fruit. These fruits may be combined with cabbage, lettuce, celery or cucumbers. Do not mix too many foods in a meal, for to do so is indicative of poor taste. Those with refined palates like simple meals, and there is no reason for making salads so complex, when simplicity is a requirement for building health. However, a complex salad made of raw vegetables and raw juicy fruits does not play so much havoc as a mixture of concentrated foods.

    Lettuce and celery are the most satisfactory salad vegetables to mix with fruits.

    People who eat raw fruits do not need to eat the raw salad vegetables, for fruits and vegetables supply the same salts. Those who avoid both raw fruits and raw vegetables are not treating their bodies fairly.

    The vegetable salads are most satisfactory when taken in combination with flesh, nuts or eggs, together with cooked succulent vegetables. They may be eaten with starchy foods, but then they should contain little or no acid.

    Green salads including leaf lettuces are generally served with a dressing, as well as various garnishes such as nuts or croutons, and sometimes with the addition of meat, fish, pasta, cheese, eggs, or whole grains.

    Salads may be served at any point during a meal. They may be:

    Summer, winter, spring or fall, salad is always on our menus. On a hot summer's day, salad spares the kitchen from excess heat and becomes a meal of its own, providing a light, but nutritious meal.

    Whether we talk of hearty bean salads, of delicate concoctions of rice, of vegetables with marinated, grilled meats and fish incorporated, no discussion of salad can begin without the rightful ruler of the salad plate - lettuce. One way or another, the salad leaf has always been part of the human diet.

    Neolithic humans, living as hunter-gatherers, would not have known a bowl of greens, but would have gathered edible wild leaves.

    The word "salad" comes from the French salade of the same meaning, from the Latin salata (salty), from sal (salt). (Other salt-related words include sauce, salsa, sausage, and salary). In English, the word first appears as "salad" or "sallet" in the 14th century.

    Salt is associated with salad because vegetables were seasoned with brine or salty oil-and-vinegar dressings during Roman times.

    The terminology "salad days", meaning a "time of youthful inexperience" (on notion of "green"), is first recorded by Shakespeare in 1606, while the use of salad bar first appeared in American English in 1976.

    Food historians say the Romans ate mixed greens and dressing, and the Babylonians were known to have dressed greens with oil and vinegar two thousand years ago. In his 1699 book, Acetaria: A Discourse on Sallets, John Evelyn attempted with little success to encourage his fellow Britons to eat fresh salad greens. Royalty dabbled in salads: Mary, Queen of Scots, ate boiled celery root over salad covered with creamy mustard dressing, truffles, chervil, and slices of hard-boiled eggs.

    The United States popularized salads in the late 19th century and other regions of the world adopted them throughout the second half of the 20th century. From Europe and the Americas to China, Japan, and Australia, salads are sold commercially in supermarkets for those who do not have time to compose a home-made salad, at restaurants (restaurants will often have a "Salad Bar" laid out with salad-making ingredients, which the customers will use to put together their salad) and at fast food chains specializing in health food. In the US market, fast food chains such as McDonald's and KFC, that typically sold "junk food" such as hamburgers, fries, and fried chicken, now sell packaged salads to appeal to the health-conscious.

    The ancient Sumerians had lettuce, cress and mustard, and the Egyptians put seeds in tombs as a gift to accompany the departed on that journey into the unknown. An Assyrian herbal listed lettuce as part of the garden of a Babylonian king. In Greece, Herodotus wrote that the kings of Persia had lettuce. In ancient Rome Apicius offered a recipe for a puree of cooked lettuce and onion, but the Romans generally ate lettuce as we do. The term salad comes from the Vulgar Roman herba salata, which translates as 'salted herb,' an indication of the way ancient Romans prepared salad greens .Through recorded history, lettuce and salad have always ranked high in nutritional esteem. Galen called it "the food of the wise," while both Galen and Hippocrates believed that salad passed through the system easily and had cleansing effect. In the time of Louis XIV, Brillat-Savarin wrote, "I commend salad to all those that have faith in me; it refreshes without weakening, and soothes without irritating I often call it the rejuvenator."

    Food historians cannot trace the journey of salad across Europe, but we know that the English, whose climate was well suited to cool-loving greens, embraced lettuce by the 15th century. The French adopted salads in imitation of their king, Louis XIV, who was very fond of salad, especially when dressed with tarragon, basil or violets. The French writer, Rabelais, lists many salads, among them cress, asparagus, chervil. Over time, the list grew to include chicory, sorrel, dandelion, purslane, mallow, bugloss. Perhaps too many greens were tossed on the salad plate, for by the 18th century, the French disparaged salad, and used the word salade for anything that was messy.

    Salad: Evolution and Revolution

    Columbus reputedly introduced lettuce to the Americas, though only the wealthy landowners, such as Thomas Jefferson, a zealous agriculturist, were able to indulge in salad. Salads have lived through fads and the natural evolution of changing times. A century ago, there was only icebox lettuce, that stalwart friend who survived both early means of transport and crude refrigeration yet arrived intact. As refrigeration sophisticated, as transportation came to include the airplane flying round the globe, horizons widened, and heads of lettuce became jet set travelers, collecting more air miles than the busiest of businessman.

    No evolving means of preservation has been as powerful as the revolution started by Alice Waters. She told us to go back to the beginning and be 'gatherers' of a more sophisticated sort. She insisted we eat food as freshly picked from the garden as possible, then introduced us to the glory of baby lettuce leaves. Food concepts are continually changing, and lettuce once meant iceberg, then changed to include iceberg's buttery, or red-leafed friends. Enterprising Italian-American growers watched, and gambled that Americans might like a lettuce known in Italy as radicchio and soon that became a delicious fad. Today we are entranced by mesclun a salad of small baby greens whose name comes from Provençe and means 'mixed.' Mâche, a hardy plant also called lamb's lettuce, is another current favorite. We now buy packaged, pre-washed baby lettuce for the most buttery of salads.

    The First Superstar Chef - A Salad Maker?

    Brillat-Savarin tells of one d'Albignac, a Frenchman who had made his reputation in England because of his skill in mixing salad. D'Albignac had a following of worshipful Englishmen who believed the French more skilled in the kitchen. Like many superstar chefs today, he had an eye for public relations, and soon he owned a luxurious carriage, and had at least one servant, if not an entourage, responsible for carrying his suitcase of secret ingredients. The case held different vinegars, various oils, soy, caviare, truffles, anchovies, ketchup, meat extracts, and egg yolks. As his reputation grew, he added an eye for marketing to that of public relations. He marketed his name and had the case reproduced. He sold the cases by the hundreds. D'Albignac returned to his native country a star.

    The presence of eggs yolk probably signified mayonnaise. Writing between 1820 and 1911, the early Italian cookbook writer, Pellegrino Artusi, said of mayonnaise salads: "Some cooks who suffer from poor taste will present this salad with such a mix of ingredients that the next day you have to turn to Hungarian water or castor oil for relief." Perhaps we need our superstar chefs, after all.

    In the hands of great chefs, today's salads are imaginative combinations of vegetables with slices of grilled meat or fish artfully strewn on top. Reliable bean salads make nourishing vegetarian meals that even meat lovers enjoy, while rice salads make a nourishing side accompaniment to a meal. Using brown rice, those salads often stand in for meat.

    Popular salad garnishes are nuts, croutons, anchovies, bacon bits (real or imitation), garden beet, bell peppers, shredded carrots, diced celery, cress, sliced cucumber, parsley, sliced mushrooms, sliced red onion, radish, sunflower seeds (shelled), real or artificial crab meat (surimi) and cherry tomatoes. Various cheeses, berries, seeds and other ingredients can also be added to green salads. Cheeses, in the form of cubes, crumbles, or grated, are often used, including blue cheese, Parmesan cheese, and feta cheese. Color considerations are sometimes addressed by using edible flowers, red radishes, carrots, various colors of peppers, and other colorful ingredients.

    The moshav (settlement) of Sde Warburg, Israel, holds the Guinness World Record for the largest lettuce salad, weighing 10,260 kg. The event, held on 10 November 2007, was part of the 70th anniversary celebration of the founding of the moshav. The salad was sold to participants and onlookers alike for 10 NIS per bowl, raising 100,000 NIS (over $25,000) to benefit Aleh Negev, a rehabilitative village for young adults suffering from severe physical and cognitive disabilities. Major General (Res.) Doron Almog, Chairman of Aleh Negev was present to accept the donation and commended the residents, who had grown the lettuce and prepared the salad on the moshav. The volunteer effort to prepare the salad itself took all day and most of the residents, ranging from many of the original founders of the moshav to young children, participated.

    image of prepared salad

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