An astonishingly small number of American families know what a delicious and hygienically valuable dish salad is with a French dressing of good olive oil and pure, fragrant vinegar.
There is very little nourishment in salad leaves until the oil has been added; and the oil is what we need, with the vinegar to help digest it.
The two words I have just italicized explain why so many Americans imagine they do not like salads with vinegar and oil dressing. Unless the oil is good and the vinegar pure and fragrant such a salad does no good but may do much harm; and it is seldom that one can buy good oil and vinegar in a grocery store.
Of all the food adulterators none are more rascally and abundant than the makers of artificial vinegar. Pure vinegars made of cider, wine, or malt can be sold at a very good profit to the manufacturer and dealer at from ten to twenty cents a quart; but this profit does not satisfy the swinish greed of the adulterators and unscrupulous grocers. By using acetic acid, a by-product of the distillation of deadly wool-alcohol, they can make "vinegar" at a cost of two cents a gallon, or 90 cents a barrel, which retails at over $20.
The pure food law covers this case, but the fines inflicted are so trifling compared with the gains, that the adulterators regard them in the light of a joke and continue their profitable poisoning, though many of them have been before the courts two, three, or four times. Jail is what their crime calls for. This so-called vinegar is in most cases injurious to the health of those who consume it, and by its lack of agreeable fragrance it discourages the healthful practice of eating sour salads.
It is foolish to get vinegar of the nearest corner grocer unless you know he is honest. It is best to buy it in the sealed bottles of firms which have a national or international reputation for fair dealing.
The same caution should be observed in purchasing olive oil. Do not buy it of a grocer who exposes his bottles in the show window. If he does not know that sunlight spoils the best olive oil, he is not likely to know, or care, what the best oil is.
Among the adulterants used to cheapen olive oil small quantities of castor oil, lard oil, fish oil, and even petroleum have been found. More frequent are rapeseed and poppy-seed oil. Peanut oil is much used, but the most frequent adulterant is cottonseed oil, which costs only about one-fifth the price of high-grade olive oil and therefore offers great temptation to the dealer.
Cottonseed oil is not inferior in nutritive value to olive oil, and Dr. Wiley assures us that no objection can be made to it "from any hygienic or dietetic point of view." Of the three million barrels of it produced in this country every year, not less than two-thirds are consumed as food. It is "perfectly satisfactory," the doctor adds, "to those who have not acquired a taste for olive oil."
If you like cottonseed oil there is no reason in the world why you should not pour it into your salad bowl. But if you wish to enjoy the epicurean delights of true salads you must train your sense of smell and learn to distinguish between fragrant oil and cottonseed oil, which, at its worst, has a disagreeable flavor and at its best is practically odorless and tasteless.