How to Eat Your Salad Historically

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.)

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.