1) Before you eat
your salad, or dismiss it for its more seasonably appealing cousin, the soup,
please consider what it’s been through.
Get to know
it a bit. This is your salad. There are many like it, but this one is yours.
Whether it’s a kaleidoscope of peppers and peaches, or the simple poetry of a
Caesar, your salad has spanned oceans and millennia (and may have suffered some
litigation in East Texas, which we’ll get to) to sit humbly beside your
entrée. Lose yourself in the majesty. Tears are permissible.
In fact, if you
cry into your salad, it might feel right at home. Your salad’s ancient
ancestors were wet, salty affairs. A salad under Caesar would have been a
selection of pickled vegetables, covered in oil and/or vinegar, with generous
salt, as wealth allowed. (Caesar’s salads were not Caesar salads. In fact, the
Caesars of old had very little in common with the salad’s namesake, the former
being emperors, and the latter being an Italian chef who lived in Tijuana
during the Roaring Twenties.)
The Romans liked
their salad, though they probably “borrowed” the idea from the Greeks, as they
were fond of doing. (See also: religion, clothing, democracy, military
strategy.) While the “idea” for the modern salad may belong to Greece, it was
the Roman designation, the Vulgar Latin herba
salata, meaning “salted herbs,” that would eventually evolve into our word
“salad.” (Greece does get credit for the word “idea,” and even the idea of an idea, but who’s keeping
score?) Salad found advocacy in the wise among both societies, with the Greek
Hippocrates and the Roman Galen, some five hundred years later, each lauding
the virtues of salad as both bowel cleanser and palette cleanser. There aren’t
many things that share that double distinction, so three cheers for salad.
Mind you, the
ancient Greeks liked their salad, and they were, of course, Greek, but they
were not eating what we would call “Greek salad” in 400 BC. “Greek salads”
wouldn’t come into play until the 20th century, where they were introduced in…
the United States. Our Greek salads, in
their charmingly American way, break all the rules, so if you want beets in
your salad, you’re better off going to Greektown than Greece. A modern Greek
may attack you if you go anywhere near his Horiatiki (Greek “peasant” or
“rustic” salad) with beets and feta cheese.
Speaking of wanton violence, Christopher
Columbus has become an increasingly polarizing figure in recent years, as our
framing of history evolves. But whether you see him as a bold adventurer and
emissary of civilization or an opportunistic murderer, it’s hard to argue with
his contribution to the modern salad. In short, he’s given credit for bringing
home the lettuce and cucumbers, and taking back the tomatoes. (Although Hernán
Cortés also brought back tomatoes
when he was finished slaughtering the Aztecs.) Thus were the native peoples of
North America able to enjoy the cucumber, though that may be a poor consolation
prize.
Esteem for the cuke has varied widely among peoples. (Folk etymology tells us that our word, “cucumber,” is a mutation of the word “cowcumber,” so called because farmers thought that the vegetable was most suited to feeding cows. Real, non-folk etymology tells us that the word’s origin is Latin. Nevertheless, the “cowcumber” had a less-than-spotless reputation for centuries, likely due to its tendency to spoil quickly.)
Esteem for the cuke has varied widely among peoples. (Folk etymology tells us that our word, “cucumber,” is a mutation of the word “cowcumber,” so called because farmers thought that the vegetable was most suited to feeding cows. Real, non-folk etymology tells us that the word’s origin is Latin. Nevertheless, the “cowcumber” had a less-than-spotless reputation for centuries, likely due to its tendency to spoil quickly.)
Meanwhile, the
tomato became huge in Europe; the pomi
d’oro put North America on the (totally inaccurate) map. Italy, as you may
have gathered, fell in love with the “golden apple” and never looked back.
(Occasional Alfredo dalliances notwithstanding.)
The United States
didn’t exist during the first couple millennia of salad’s existence, so we
didn’t contribute very much in the way of salad evolution until the twentieth
century. British colonists were getting all disgruntled about the crown over
plates of salmagundi. (A corruption of the word “salmagundi” probably birthed
the charming nursery tale of “Solomon Grundy.” What do you expect of a dish
that is composed of “meats, vegetables, seafood, nuts, and flowers?” It's like a shepherd's pie for people with nothing to lose.)
The United States,
as a country of immigrants, had always embraced culinary diversity. But a melting
pot is no place for a salad. We were late bloomers, as far as salad is concerned. To clobber you with a third metaphor, it was only after we found our voice that we realized we had so much to say, salad-wise.
An emerging middle
class, and what the history books call the “home economics boom” of the early
nineteen-hundreds, saw meal preparers refining the domestic arts to
unprecedented levels. Homemakers put a premium on control and the aesthetically
responsible arrangement of salad elements. This ultimately led to such
regrettable leaps in logic as fruit salads, suspensions in gelatin, and other
so-called salad mutations too grotesque to name here. (Unless you’re into that
sort of thing.)
Fantastic-but-brutal experiments are all well and good. But the USA’s indelible mark on the modern salad didn’t come in the form of some Island of Dr. Moreau-style hijinks.
If the red in the
American culinary flag is ketchup, and the blue is Kool-Aid, then the white is
none other than that creamy, savory, versatile, guilty pleasure of condiments:
Ranch. Ranch, sneered at by the culinarati and championed by the masses. Ranch, dripping
Americana across pizza, salads, and chicken nuggets. While twentieth-century
America also gave the world Green Goddess, Thousand Island, and French
dressings, it’s Ranch that will forever be our defining condiment, our spirit
animal of sauces.
Like many great
American stories, Ranch’s begins with a cowboy. Well, actually, it begins with
a plumber—one Steve Henson—who used his savings to buy a dude ranch, which he
named Hidden Valley, and in so doing, became a cowboy. His first order of
business as a cowboy was to create a savory salad dressing for his guests,
obviously, and the rest is history. Almost.
Hidden Valley
Ranch is indisputably the first Ranch. But with the advent of bottled salad
dressing and “just add” packets, Ranch caught on in a big way, and the sixties
and seventies were host to a litany of trademark infringement suits between
companies grappling for market share. As the country had its two-hundredth
birthday, in 1976, a federal judge told a Fort Worth courtroom that “ranch
style” belonged to us all.
So please, look at your salad
again. Follow the trail of (any brand) ranch style dressing past banana
peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes, as it winds its way deep into the lettuce
undergrowth, through litigation and ancient Rome, over a dusting of cracked
pepper, and past a conquistador. Understand that before you sits a pilgrim, an
exemplar of the human will to till the earth, to assimilate instead of destroy,
to turn the necessity of eating into the art of dining.
2) Plunge in your
fork, with respect.
