How to make a Sallet of all manner of Hearbs. Take your hearbs, and pick them clean, and the floures; wash them clean, and swing them in a strainer; then put them into a dish, and mingle them with Cowcumbers, and Lemons, sliced very thin; then scrape on Sugar, and put in Vinegar and Oil; then spread the floures on the top; garnish your dish with hard Eggs, and all sorts of your floures; scrape on Sugar and serve it.
An even earlier work, Cogan’s “Haven of Health” (1589), has the following reference: “Lettuse is much used in salets in the sommer tyme with vinegar, oyle, and sugar and salt, and is formed to procure appetite for meate, and to temper the heate of the stomach and liver.”
Montaigne recounts a conversation he had with an Italian chef who had served in the kitchen of Cardinal Caraffa up to the death of his gastronomic eminence. “I made him,” he says, “tell me something about his post. He gave me a lecture on the science of eating, with a gravity and magisterial countenance as if he had been determining some vexed question in theology.... The difference of salads, according to the seasons, he next discoursed upon. He explained what sorts ought to be prepared warm, and those which should always be served cold; the way of adorning and embellishing them in order to render them seductive to the eye. After this he entered on the order of table-service, a subject full of fine and important considerations.”
An excerpt from “a late exquisite comedy” called The Lawyer’s Fortune, or Love in a Hollow Tree, is quoted by Dr. King (1709):—
Mrs. Favourite. Mistress, shall I put any Mushrooms, Mangoes, or Bamboons into the Sallad?
Lady Bonona. Yes, I prithee, the best thou hast.
Mrs. Favourite. Shall I use Ketchop or Anchovies in the Gravy?
Lady Bonona. What you will!
A quaint old book on Salads is entitled “On the Use and Abuse of Salads in general and Salad Plants in Particular,” by Johann Friedrich Schütze, Doctor of Medicine, and Grand-Ducal Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen, Physician at Sonnenburg and Neuhaus: Leipzig, 1758. The learned doctor adopts the classical division of humanity into the Temperamentum Sanguineum, or warm and damp, the Cholericum, or warm and dry, the Phlegmaticum, or cold and damp, and the Melancholicum, or cold and dry. To each of these classes a particular form of Salad applies, and none other.
When Pope Sixtus the Fifth was an obscure monk he had a great friend in a certain lawyer who sank steadily into poverty what time the monk rose to the Papacy. The poor lawyer journeyed to Rome to seek aid from his old friend the Pope, but he fell sick by the wayside and told his doctor to let the Pope know of his sad state. “I will send him a salad,” said Sixtus, and duly dispatched a basket of lettuces to the invalid. When the lettuces were opened money was found in their hearts. Hence the Italian proverb of a man in need of money: “He wants one of Sixtus the Fifth’s salads.”