Salad
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Salad is a broad term applied to many food preparations that are a mixture of chopped or sliced ingredients. A salad can be served cold or at room temperature, though it also can form the filling for a hot sandwich. While it can be made with meat or eggs, it usually includes at least one raw vegetable or fruit. Often it is prepared or served with a dressing.
A salad may be served before or after the main dish as a separate course, as a main course in itself, or as a side dish.
The word "salad" comes from the French salade of the same meaning, from the Latin salata, "salty", from sal, "salt". (See also sauce, salsa, sausage.)
Salad commonly refers to a blended food item— often meat, seafood or eggs blended with mayonnaise, finely chopped vegetables and seasonings— which can be served as part of a green salad or used as a sandwich filling. Salads of this kind include egg, chicken, tuna, shrimp, and ham salad.
In Denmark salad refers to a blend of vegetables in a dressing used as a condiment on top of the open sandwich, smørrebrød, and with meats. Examples include cucumber salad, horseradish salad, Italian salad (a mixture of vegetables in a crème fraîche/mayonnaise dressing, served on ham), and Russian salad (a red beet salad).
The green salad
The "green salad" is most often composed of a mixture of uncooked or cold, cooked vegetables, built up on a base of leaf vegetables such as one or more lettuce varieties, spinach, or arugula.
Other common vegetables in a green salad include tomato, cucumber, peppers, mushroom, onion, spring onion, carrot and radish. Other food items such as pasta, olives, cooked potatoes, rice, beans, croutons, meat (e.g. bacon, chicken), cheese, or fish (e.g. tuna) are sometimes added to salads.
Types of green salad
- Caesar salad
- Chef salad
- Cobb salad
- Greek salad
- Hawaiian salad
- Italian salad
- Mesclun salad
- Niçoise salad
- Tossed salad
Salad dressings
A green salad is often served with a dressing. Some examples include:- Mayonnaise
- * Louis dressing
- * Ranch dressing
- * Russian dressing
- * Thousand Island dressing
- * Green goddess dressing
- * Blue cheese dressing
- Olive oil
- * French dressing
- Vinaigrette
- Tahini
- Italian dressing
Salad garnishes
There are various vegetables and other fare that are often added to green salad. Some of them are:
- shelled sunflower seeds
- onions (mostly the red variety)
- bacon bits (sometimes the bits are artificially flavored pieces of textured soybean protein)
- radishes
- grated carrots
- tomatoes
- surimi - artificial crab meat
- cucumbers
- bell peppers
Other types of salads
Some salads are based on food items other than fresh vegetables:
- Bean salad
- Chicken salad
- Congealed salad
- Egg salad
- Fruit salad
- Larb from Laos
- Pasta salad
- Potato salad
- Shopska salad from Bulgaria
- Somen salad from Japan
- Som tam from Thailand
- Tabouli
- Tuna salad
- Waldorf salad
- Watergate salad
History
In the Middle Ages, after eating mostly salted meats and pickled vegetables all winter, people would be "salt-sick" and looked forward to spring greens. Popular history asserts that peasants ate more salads than lords, and were the healthier for it, and in fact salads, cooked and raw, included many ingredients that would be "gourmet" today: lovage, burnet, sorrel.The diarist John Evelyn wrote a book on salads, (1699), that describes the new salad greens like "sellery" (celery), coming out of Italy and the Netherlands.
External links
- [Alice Roth, "Sallets"]
- [Complete Recipes - Salads]
- [Lettuces for the home gardener]
- [Salad Greens for the home gardener]
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