Salad

Salad (pronounced sal-uhd)

(1) A usually cold (a few are “warm”) dish consisting of vegetables, as lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, covered with a dressing and sometimes containing fruit, seafood, meat eggs or other additions; any of various dishes consisting of foods, as meat, seafood, eggs, pasta, or fruit, prepared singly or combined, usually cut up, mixed with a dressing, and served cold (often with a modifier: Caesar salad, Niçoise salad, pasta salad, Greek salad, Thai salad, tossed salad, chicken salad, potato salad, fruit salad etc).

(2) Any herb or green vegetable, as lettuce, used for salads or eaten raw.

(3) Figuratively, a mixture or assortment of people or things, similar or disparate.

1350–1400: From the Middle English salade & salad (raw herbs cut up and variously dressed), from the Old & Middle French salade, from the Old Provençal salada, from salar (to season with salt), from the Northern Italian salada & salata, from the Vulgar Latin salāta (literally "salted" and short for herba salata), from salāre, the feminine past participle of salāre (to salt (in Antiquity, the Romans seasoned vegetables with brine or salty oil-and-vinegar dressings)), the construct being sal- (genitive salis; stem of sāl (salt)) + -āta- (added to nouns to form adjectives and akin to –ate).  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.  Salad’s alternative spelling between the sixteenth & nineteenth centuries was sallet.  Salad is a noun: the noun plural is salads.

In Europe, the Dutch salade, the German Salat, the Swedish salat and the Russian salat are from Romanic languages.  The early use was exclusively of herbs and vegetables but came later to be extended to dishes including meat chopped and mixed with uncooked herbs and variously seasoned, the point being that the meat was an addition to a concoction predominately of vegetables.  As a reference to the raw herbs and vegetables themselves, in the US by the early nineteenth century most had limited the application of “salad” to lettuce while all else were “greens” although, except in the South, “salad” has in recent years crept back.  Salad oil "olive oil used for dressing salads" was known by the 1550s and the salad fork was listed for sale as early as 1808.  The salad bar was an invention of US English, attested by 1940.

The idiomatic salad days is a rarely used phrase that survives because William Shakespeare (1654-1616) used it once in all that he wrote and it’s used exclusively in the plural; nobody has ever had a “salad day”.  It’s presumed usually to convey a sense of youthful innocence enthusiasm and idealism associated with inexperience and is sometimes confused with “halcyon days” which actually summons the idea of a time of calm, a nostalgic idealizing of a past.  Not all however thought something worth repeating just because it came from the bard's quill.  The unforgiving Henry Fowler (1858-1933) thought salad days just a cliché and even doubted the accepted meaning.  In Modern English Usage (1926) he though youth, like salad might variously be thought (1) green & raw, (2) prone to a preference for highly flavored tastes or (3) innocent as a herb unlike corrupted meat.  Even for the old curmudgeon that seems a stretch but his point was that few who used the phase properly understood its meaning and it was thus “fitter for parrots than for human speech”.

Salad days was spoken by Cleopatra in Act 1, Scene 5 of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (circa 1607).

CHARMIAN The valiant Caesar!

CLEOPATRA By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth

If thou with Caesar paragon again

My man of men.

CHARMIAN By your most gracious pardon,

I sing but after you.

CLEOPATRA My salad days,

When I was green in judgment, cold in blood,

To say as I said then. But come, away,

Get me ink and paper.

He shall have every day a several greeting,

Or I’ll unpeople Egypt.

Having spoken longingly of Antony. Cleopatra doesn’t like it mentioned that once she spoke of her lover Caesar with the same ecstasy and when reminded they were her own words, Cleopatra concedes the point but puts it down to the rash impetuosity of youth, salad days when she was “green in judgment, cold in blood”.  The convention explanation of salad days as Shakespeare’s device is that the Cleopatra used the image of the salad (green and cold) as something served before the richer, more substantial, hot main course, making the point it was youthful inexperience which made her idealize her affair with Caesar.  It was the passionate Antony who made her blood boil.  Shakespeare never returned to the phrase but had earlier used “green” in the same sense.  In Hamlet (circa 1601), when Ophelia is speaking to her father Polonius, about her troubled relationship with Hamlet, he says “You speak like a green girl; Unsifted in such perilous circumstances.”

Others liked it though.  Although Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness (1954)) tended to overshadow the later work of French novelist Francoise Sagan (1935-2004), her Salad Days (1980) is especially admired in English translation and one of the century’s better evocations of the well-worn tale of star-cross’d lovers.  Quite how many cook books, entertaining guides and such have been titled “Salad Days” (there have also been not a few “Salad Daze”) is not known but it’s many.  When Elizabeth II (1926-2022; Queen of England and other places variously 1952-2022) delivered a Silver Jubilee Royal Address (1977), she reiterated the vow to God and her people she gave in her twenty-first birthday broadcast (1947), adding: “Although that vow was made in my salad days, when I was green in judgment”, it still held.  Her conclusion was different from Shakespeare’s Cleopatra whose feelings had changed since those salad days.  Elizabeth II never wavered.

In the aftermath of her death, the words she spoke in those salad days were widely and admiringly quoted: 

"I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."

There were however historians who, in their capacity as public psychologists, noted that few thought to trouble the people of 2022 with her concluding remarks:

"But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do: I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow, and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it."

Egg & Potato Salad

Ingredients

6 large Dutch cream(or Desiree) potatoes, cut into 50 mm (2 inch) cubes

6 eggs, at room temperature

250 grams crème fraîche

200 grams mayonnaise

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

70 grams salted baby capers, rinsed and drained

100 grams cornichons, thinly sliced

2 golden shallots, thinly sliced

To garnish: some flat-leaf parsley, torn

Instructions

(1) Cook potatoes in boiling salted water until tender (10-15 minutes), then drain and set aside to steam dry.

(2) While the potatoes are cooking, place eggs in a saucepan of salted boiling water and cook for 8 minutes (for medium-cooked yolks), then drain and transfer to iced water to stop cooking. Peel, quarter and set aside.

(3) Combine remaining ingredients in a bowl and season to taste. Add potato and gently mix to coat well, then transfer to a platter, top with eggs, scatter with parsley, season with black pepper and serve.