The word salad literally means salted, thanks to Roman brine dressings
Romans seasoned raw vegetables with brine or salty oil and vinegar, and Vulgar Latin called the result herba salata, salted herb. That phrase became the French salade and, by the 14th century, the English salad. Since then the dish has absorbed everything from pasta to gelatin and crumbled cookies.
A salad is simply a mix of ingredients, usually vegetables, served cold, at room temperature or sometimes warm, generally with a dressing. Most dressings start from one of two bases: oil and vinegar, or something creamy and dairy. So common is the leafy garden version, built on lettuce, rocket, kale or spinach, that the bare word often means exactly that.
Cooks divide salads in several ways. A composed salad has its parts arranged on the plate, like an Italian antipasto, while a tossed one is mixed in a bowl. Bound salads such as egg or potato salad are held together with a thick sauce like mayonnaise, firm enough to keep their shape when scooped, which is why some become sandwich fillings. Dinner salads add protein: the Cobb traditionally carries Roquefort. At the far end are dessert salads of gelatin, whipped cream or fruit, including a Midwestern creation built around crumbled cookies.
Greeks and Romans ate dressed mixed greens, and the habit spread with their empires. Mary, Queen of Scots, is said to have eaten boiled celery root on greens with a creamy mustard dressing, truffles and sliced egg. In 1699 John Evelyn published Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, often called the first salad book, trying without much luck to get the British eating fresh leaves. Cargo lists from the Dutch colony of New Netherland valued salad oil at 1.10 florins per can, and a 1665 letter from Curaçao begged for lettuce and cabbage seed.
The earliest recorded use of salad days, for green and inexperienced youth, is Shakespeare's in 1606; salad bar entered American English in 1937. In 2014 US salad restaurants earned more than $300 million, and home eaters were shifting from chopping lettuce to bagged greens and kits, a market expected to reach $7 billion a year.
Source: Salad
