[CHAPTER XIII]
SALADS
“O green and glorious, O herbaceous meat!
’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat.
Back to the world he’d turn his weary soul,
And dip his fingers in the salad bowl!”
Nebuchadnezzar v. Sydney Smith—Salt?—No salad-bowl—French origin—Apocryphal story of Francatelli—Salads and salads—Water-cress and dirty water—Salad-maker born not made—Lobster salad—Lettuce, Wipe or wash?—Mayonnaise—Potato salad—Tomato ditto—Celery ditto—A memorable ditto.
If Sydney Smith had only possessed the experience of old King Nebuchadnezzar, after he had been “turned out to grass,” the witty prebend might not have waxed quite so enthusiastic on the subject of “herbaceous meat.” Still the subject is a vast and important one, in its connection with gastronomy, and lends itself to poetry far easier than doth the little sucking pig, upon whom Charles Lamb expended so great and unnecessary a wealth of language.
But look at the terse, perfunctory, and far from satisfactory manner in which the Encyclopædia attacks the subject. “Salad,” we read, “is the term given to a preparation of raw herbs for food. It derives its name from the fact that salt is one of the chief ingredients used in dressing a salad.” This statement is not only misleading but startling; for in the “dressing” of a salad it would be the act of a lunatic to make salt the “chief ingredient.”
Long before they had learnt the art of dressing the herbs, our ancestors partook of cresses (assorted), celery, and lettuces, after being soaked in water for a considerable period; and they dipped the raw herbs into salt before consuming them. In fact, in many a cheap eating-house of to-day, the term “salad” means plain lettuce, or cress, or possibly both, absolutely undressed—in a state of nature, plus plenty of dirty water. Even the English cook of the end of the nineteenth century cannot rid himself, or herself, of the idea that lettuce, like water-cress, knows the running brook, or the peaceful pond, as its natural element. And thirty years before the end of that century, a salad bowl was absolutely unknown in nine-tenths of the eating-houses of Great Britain.
There is no use in blinking the fact that it is to our lively neighbours that we owe the introduction of the salad proper. Often as the writer has been compelled, in these pages, to inveigh against the torturing of good fish and flesh by the alien cook, and the high prices charged for its endowment with an alien flavour, let that writer (figuratively) place a crown of endive, tipped with baby onions, upon the brows of the philanthropist who dressed the first salad, and gave the recipe to the world. That recipe has, of course, been improved upon; and although the savant who writes in the Encyclopædia proclaims that “salad has always been a favourite food with civilised nations, and has varied very little in its composition,” the accuracy of both statements is open to question.