“I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I wonder not at the French with their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them make them my common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs.”
Sir Thomas Browne, “Religio Medici.”
We have it on the authority of Chaucer that salad is cooling food, for he says:—
- ... And after that they yede about gadering
- Pleasaunt Salades which they made hem eat,
- For to refresh their great unkindly heat.
That the eating of green meat is and always has been closely bound up with healthy human life is a fact which needs no demonstration; but the constantly recurring references to it in the literature of all ages would seem to point the moral in so far as salads must always have appealed peculiarly to those leading a more or less sedentary life.
In a serious Biblical commentary of the eighteenth century, Baron von Vaerst, a German savant, refers to Nebuchadnezzar’s diet of grass as a punishment which did not in any way consist in the eating of salad, but in the enforced absence of vinegar, oil, and salt. That salad adds a zest to life is proved by St. Anthony, who said that the pious old man, St. Hieronymus, lived to the green old age of 105, and during the last ninety years of his life existed wholly upon bread and water, but “not without a certain lusting after salad.” This is confirmed by St. Athanasius.
In Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” Jack Cade remarks that a salad “is not amiss to cool a man’s stomach in the hot weather.” Cleopatra too refers to her “salad days, when she was green in judgment, cool in blood.” In “Le Quadragesimal Spiritual,” a work on theology published in Paris in 1521, these lines occur:—
La Salade moult proffitable
Signe la parolle de Dieu
Qu’il faut ouyr en chascun lieu.