47 Fun Facts About Salad

The word 'salad' ultimately derives from the Latin for what?

Salted is the root: classical cooks dressed raw greens with salt or brine, so 'salata', salted things, became 'salade' in French and 'sallet' in 14th-century English.

Which writer first recorded the phrase 'salad days', meaning youthful inexperience, in 1606?

William Shakespeare gave the phrase to Cleopatra, who looks back on her youthful affair with Julius Caesar: 'my salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood'.

John Evelyn's 1699 Acetaria, often called the first book on salads, tried to get whom to eat fresh greens?

The Britons got only a fragment of his plan: Evelyn, the diarist, worked for much of his life on a vast gardening encyclopedia he never finished, and published its salad chapter on its own.

In which city was the Caesar salad created in 1924?

Tijuana drew Americans dodging Prohibition, and restaurateur Caesar Cardini is said to have improvised the salad there when a Fourth of July rush emptied his kitchen.

Which lettuce is the traditional base of a Caesar salad?

Romaine came whole in the original: the leaves were dressed uncut and meant to be lifted by the stem and eaten with the fingers.

Julia Child's Caesar recipe in the 1970s was based on an interview with whom?

Cardini's daughter Rosa said her father tossed the ingredients in one at a time, and that his original used Worcestershire sauce, with no anchovies at all.

The Cobb salad is named after the owner of which Hollywood restaurant?

The Brown Derby's owner, Robert Cobb, is said to have thrown it together from kitchen leftovers for a midnight snack in 1937; a rival story credits his chef in 1929.

Which blue cheese is traditional in a Cobb salad?

Roquefort came at the second attempt: by his restaurant's own cookbook, the inventor first chopped an avocado with lettuce, tomato and bacon for his dinner, then tried again days later with chicken, egg and the cheese.

The original 1896 Waldorf salad had no walnuts: it was just mayonnaise, apples and which vegetable?

Celery, apples and mayonnaise were the whole recipe, created for a society charity event in New York; walnuts had been added by the time The Rector Cook Book printed the recipe in 1928.

Oscar Tschirky, credited with the Waldorf salad, was never a cook; what was his job?

Maître d'hôtel Tschirky ran the dining room, not the kitchen, yet in 1896 the man known as 'Oscar of the Waldorf' put his name to a large cookbook that carried the salad's recipe.

What distinguishes an authentic Greek horiatiki from most 'Greek salads' served abroad?

It contains no lettuce, and its slab of feta is said to have begun as a dodge: Athens taverna owners added the cheese so that a price-capped tomato salad became a new dish they could price freely.

Jacques Médecin, mayor of Nice and salade niçoise purist, begged cooks 'never, never' to include which restaurant favourite?

Boiled potato, or any other boiled vegetable, was banned from Médecin's 1972 recipe: he wanted the salad raw, mostly tomatoes, served in a wooden bowl rubbed with garlic.

Which three ingredients make up a Caprese salad?

Tomato, mozzarella, basil: red, white and green, which one account calls a patriotic homage to the Italian flag, on a salad named for the island of Capri.

The word 'coleslaw' is an 18th-century anglicisation of a term from which language?

Dutch koolsla simply means 'cabbage salad'; English borrowed it in the late 18th century, probably from Dutch settlers in America, and at first tamed it to 'cold slaw'.

Austrian and south German potato salad is traditionally dressed with what, and served warm?

Oil and vinegar also dressed the first American potato salads: the mid-19th-century recipes arrived with German settlers, while north Germans serve theirs cold with mayonnaise.

Tabbouleh is a Levantine salad built around soaked bulgur and which herb?

Parsley is the point: in Lebanon and Syria the salad is mostly chopped herb with a little bulgur, while Western versions often reverse the proportions.

Fattoush gets its crunch from toasted or fried pieces of what?

Pita bread gone stale is the reason the dish exists: fattoush belongs to a family of Levantine dishes built on leftover flatbread, sharpened here with sour sumac.

Panzanella, the summer bread salad, comes from which region of Italy?

Tuscany's bread salad may have begun without tomatoes: a 16th-century poem by the painter Bronzino, often read as an early description of it, praises bread eaten with a salad of chopped onion and cucumber.

Olivier salad, a Russian New Year staple, was invented in the 1860s by the chef of which Moscow restaurant?

The Hermitage's chef, Lucien Olivier, mixed his dressing alone; a sous-chef who spied on him could only manage a lesser copy, sold elsewhere as 'Stolichny' salad.

Gado-gado, an Indonesian salad of vegetables, egg, tofu and tempeh, is served with which sauce?

Peanut sauce dresses one of Indonesia's five official national dishes: the tourism ministry named them in 2018 to give the country's cooking a short list to promote to foreign visitors.

Salat katzutz, a finely diced salad of cucumber, onion and peppers, accompanies most meals in which country?

Israel's 'chopped salad' was adopted by Jewish immigrants from the local Arab kitchen in the late 19th century and spread through the kibbutzim, which had fresh produce at hand.

Lettuce belongs to the same plant family as which of these?

Sunflowers, daisies and dandelions all share lettuce's family, the asters; its Latin name, Lactuca, comes from the milky sap that oozes from a cut stem.

Which ancient civilisation left the earliest known pictures of lettuce, grown then for its seed oil?

Egyptians pressed the seeds for oil and held the plant sacred to the fertility god Min: priests carried lettuces at his festival, which is why it appears in so much tomb and temple art.

Which country grew more than half the world's lettuce in 2023?

China grew 53 percent of the 28 million tonnes of lettuce and chicory harvested worldwide in 2023, in a market that Europe and North America dominated until late last century.

Iceberg lettuce was created in 1894 by which American seed company?

Burpee's 1894 catalogue boasted 'there is no handsomer or more solid cabbage lettuce in cultivation'; the name is usually put down to the crushed ice the heads were packed on.

British cooks call the long-leaved Caesar-salad lettuce by a name most dictionaries trace to which Greek island?

Kos is the island dictionaries point to, on the theory that the lettuce was introduced from there; other authorities derive 'cos' from khus, an Arabic word for lettuce.

Arugula, or rocket, belongs to the same plant family as which vegetable?

Cabbage and arugula both belong to the mustard family, which is why the leaf, native to the Mediterranean, has such a peppery bite.

Kale is a leafy form of the very same species as which of these vegetables?

Broccoli, kale, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts are all one species, Brassica oleracea, bred over centuries for different parts: leaves, flower heads or buds.

Ranch dressing was first concocted in the early 1950s by a plumbing contractor working where?

Alaska is where Steve Henson mixed it to feed his plumbing crews; he later bought a guest ranch in California, named it Hidden Valley and served the dressing to visitors.

Ranch became America's best-selling salad dressing in 1992 by overtaking which rival?

Italian dressing was overtaken by a newcomer named for the Hidden Valley guest ranch: it sold as a dry mix to stir up at home until a bottled version that kept on the shelf arrived in the 1980s and sales climbed.

Thousand Island dressing takes its name from a region on which river?

The Saint Lawrence's Thousand Islands lie between New York and Canada; in one version of the story Sophia LaLonde, a fishing guide's wife, served the dressing at her husband's shore dinners.

A well-whisked vinaigrette is a short-lived example of what kind of mixture?

An emulsion forms when the oil is beaten into droplets through the vinegar; the classic recipe is three parts oil to one of vinegar, and a little mustard helps it hold.

The word 'crouton' comes from a French diminutive meaning what?

Little crust is the literal sense: croûton is the diminutive of croûte, 'crust', and French still uses it for the heel of a loaf, the end that is more crust than crumb.

Louis Diat of New York's Ritz-Carlton printed a 1941 recipe, with smoked ox tongue, for which salad?

Chef salad appears in Diat's Cooking à la Ritz with strips of chicken, tongue and ham on chopped lettuce, but food historians doubt that he was the one who invented it.

Ambrosia, the Southern US fruit salad of oranges, pineapple and marshmallows, is named after what?

Food of the Greek gods lent its name to a far plainer dish at first: the earliest known recipe, in Dixie Cookery (1867), is just grated coconut, sugar and oranges, with no pineapple or marshmallows.

Perfection Salad, a prize-winning recipe from Pennsylvania that launched a craze, suspended chopped vegetables in what?

Gelatin had just become easy to use: Knox sold the first granulated kind in 1894 and Jell-O soon followed, so home cooks began setting salads in moulds.

Macaroni salad made with very soft pasta and grated onion is a plate-lunch staple where?

Hawaii's plate lunch is traced to plantation labourers from many countries, who packed leftover rice with meats from home; cheap, mild mac salad was added later because it went with all of them.

Which 1990s sitcom built an episode around a 'big salad' and who got thanked for buying it?

Seinfeld's George pays for the takeaway salad Elaine asked for, but his girlfriend hands it over and gets the thanks, and he cannot rest until Elaine knows who really bought it.

Which restaurateur added salad bars to his Steak and Ale chain in the late 1960s?

Brinker later built Chili's and Bennigan's. The phrase 'salad bar' had entered American English in 1937.

Why do cooks spin washed salad leaves dry?

So dressing clings: water left on the leaves makes it slide off and thins what does stick, which leaves a salad soggy and bland.

Som tam is most closely tied to which north-eastern region of Thailand?

Isan is usually credited with giving the dish to the rest of Thailand, though one Thai historian argues it began near Bangkok and travelled north-east by rail.

Which US city gives its name to a salad topped with grilled meat and a pile of French fries?

Pittsburgh's salad has a legend: at a drive-in in the early 1960s a customer asked for a steak sandwich without the bun but with fries and dressing, and a version on lettuce followed.

Green Goddess dressing is said to have been created at San Francisco's Palace Hotel in the 1920s as a tribute to what?

A hit stage play, The Green Goddess, gave it the name: the hotel's chef, Philip Roemer, is credited with mixing the herb-green dressing in honour of its star, George Arliss.

Watergate salad, a potluck favourite since the 1970s, gets its green colour from which pudding flavour?

Pistachio pudding mix reached shops in 1975 with a Kraft recipe called Pistachio Pineapple Delight; how the dish picked up the scandal's name has never been pinned down.

Which Greek olive is typical in a horiatiki?

Kalamata olives are named for the city in the southern Peloponnese, and the EU protects the name: the same variety grown anywhere else must be sold as Kalamon.

Which 17th-century English salad of chopped meats, anchovies and eggs gave its name to any jumbled mixture?

Salmagundi was a showpiece of English and colonial American tables, and its name outlived the dish: the word now means any mixed assortment.

In Puerto Rico, macaroni salad may contain bits of which canned meat?

Spam, or diced ham in its place, goes into ensalada de coditos, a fixture of the island's holiday tables; cooks swap the mainland's pickle relish for a splash of brine from the olive jar.