The Right Way to Eat a Salad

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Clarissa

June 30, 2015

So did you know that before the decades of 1870 and 1880 Americans ate salads together with their meals (like I do)? The weird custom of bringing a salad out before the rest of the meal and finishing it before serving everything else was an affectation introduced by the nouveau riches who wanted to stand out from the plebeians.

Regular Americans served their salads in the form of a chopped head of lettuce with sugar and vinegar. The custom of substituting sugar with olive oil was introduced by those who were rich enough to travel to Europe and observe that custom there.

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32 responses to “The Right Way to Eat a Salad”

J. Otto Pohl

June 30, 2015

Last night my wife made my favorite salad.

http://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/herring-under-fur-coat/

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1. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  
  It’s my favorite, too! It’s a bit too hot for it right now but I love it in colder temperatures.
  
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Tim

June 30, 2015

They were eating salad with sugar? Bloody barbarians…

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1. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  
  Seems so. Sugar was probably making the leaves ferment a bit becoming easier to digest.
  
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2. Z
  
  July 1, 2015
  
  I have heard this referred to a few times in 19C writing. Tried it, too, didn’t like it. But vinegar or lime juice with very finely chopped peppers is a great alternative from Peru. No oil.
  
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Crystallizing Chaos

June 30, 2015

That’s very interesting. The whole notion of eating salad as a thing on it’s own befuddles me no end. In India ‘salad’ (chopped veggies) are always eaten as a side dish to you main meal.

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1. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  
  That’s how we do it, too! In a restaurant, I always have to struggle with waiters who try to carry away the salad before bringing out the main course.
  
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JaneB

June 30, 2015

In the UK we mostly eat salad with the rest of a meal – there might be a salad-ish starter like say mozarella and tomatoes, or in summer a cold main dish that is called salad (e.g. a Caesar Salad, Salad Nicoise, Greek Salad), but that’s not the same as a salad course, I think – they come with protein and usually a side of bread? I always thought it was a wierd ‘foreign’ (specifically, French) thing to have the salad on its own, another way of making the meal last a very long time and show that you were ‘cultured’ about food.

Interesting!

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1. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  
  I need to spend more time in the UK. 🙂
  
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Shakti

June 30, 2015

Wait, people ate sugar on salads? (Then again, Thousand Island dressing is basically sweet mayo dressing.) People ate salads?I thought people just boiled vegetables into insensibility and added some salt and if they were feeling frisky, ground pepper. Sugar was cheap enough for Americans to put on salads in the 1880s? Or was it a relic from the time sugar was expensive that poorer Americans affected? It’s not like iceboxes were cheap.

I know gelatin was considered super fancy because making gelatin was time consuming
So many, many questions.

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1. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  
  These are, of course, the habits of the American bourgeoisie, the people who had their own houses. Today, we would call them “the middle classes.”
  
  I’m getting this all from Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons:
  
  My wife says Ambersons don’t make lettuce salad the way other people do; they don’t chop it up with sugar and vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their vinegar, and they have it separate—not along with the rest of the meal. And they eat these olives, too: green things they are, something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they tasted a good deal like a bad hickory-nut. My wife says she’s going to buy some; you got to eat nine and then you get to like ’em, she says. Well, I wouldn’t eat nine bad hickory-nuts to get to like them, and I’m going to let these olives alone. Kind of a woman’s dish, anyway, I suspect, but most everybody’ll be makin’ a stagger to worm through nine of ’em, now Ambersons brought ’em to town.
  
  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8867/8867-h/8867-h.htm
  
  I hate olives, too. I must be terribly low class. 🙂
  
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Stringer Bell

June 30, 2015

Speaking of salads, this is the current favorite at our house. I plan to live on nothing else for the summer.

http://www.pbs.org/food/kitchen-vignettes/black-bean-quinoa-rainbow-salad/

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1. Stringer Bell
  
  June 30, 2015
  
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2. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  
  Looks sensational. I love both quinoa and black beans, so I will definitely be making it. Thank you!!!
  
  People, let’s share salad recipes.
  
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  1. Stringer Bell
    
    June 30, 2015
    
    My dirty secret: I use canned black beans. Who the fuck has time to boil beans for 2 hours? I do have a pressure cooker, but still. Let’s minimize heat generation in this summer heat.
    
    Another time and pot/pan saving tip: Put the sweet potatoes in a covered bowl with a tablespoon or two of water, and microwave on high for 6-7 minutes (for half inch cubes, longer for bigger sized chunks).
    
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    1. Shakti
      
      June 30, 2015
      
      I’d soak the beans overnight and then shove them in a pressure cooker if you’re not going to use cans. Boiling them for 2 hours is a great way to get gassy.
      For a small quantity of beans (think single person, single meal) I’m not going to make them from scratch. YMMV.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        June 30, 2015
        
        What is a pressure cooker and how come I’ve never seen one? Or have I seen one and not recognized it?
        
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        Stringer Bell
        
        June 30, 2015
        
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_cooking
        
        This is what I have. A pressure cooker allows for food to cook much quickly. I use it to make all lentil and beans soups and to steam potatoes/other veg.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        June 30, 2015
        
        Maybe I should buy one because I don’t eat more beans only because it takes forever to cook them and I don’t always have time.
        
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Stringer Bell

June 30, 2015

Another favorite, though it involves turning on the oven. I could drink that umami-bomb dressing by the bucketful.

http://dishingupthedirt.com/recipes/dinner/hippie-bowls/

Notes:
The water-quinoa ratio mentioned in the rainbow salad recipe is much better. The ratio prescribed here turns it into mush.
Raisins make it a little too sweet for my taste. Feel free to omit them.

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Shakti

June 30, 2015

Raitas:

Cucumbers.
Use a box grater to shred peeled cucumber. Dice a small white onion (optional). Add kosher salt>, freshly ground black pepper to taste and a pinch of cumin powder. Add yogurt or Greek yogurt to taste. Combine. The cucumber will exude juice, but if it’s too thick before you serve it add a small amount of buttermilk. Garnish with freshly chopped cilantro before serving (optional). The longer it sits, the juicier and waterier it gets.

Tomatoes.
Same ingredients as above except with diced tomatoes and do not add cumin powder. You can get rid of the seeds, but I don’t bother. Again the longer it sits, the waterier it gets.

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1. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  
  God, I love raitas.
  
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cliff arroyo

June 30, 2015

I thought the French ate salad after the main course?

I’m definitely from the soup or salad then main course (oddly enough called ‘entree’ in the US) school. Travelling a few months out of the year and eating in restaurants probably reinforced that.

In Poland soup is served as a first course about 95 % of the time and then the main. Any kind of vegetable dish that goes along with the main course is labelled a ‘salad’ in that case including veggies that have been cooked within an inch of their existence. Also almost any cold dish that is not entirely meat, cheese or fish is liable to be called a salad.

One of my favorite summer salads is a recipe I saw on a Burmese tv station.

Peel and thinly slice one cucumber (they removed the seeds but I don’t). Cut one onion in half lenghtwise and then slice as thinly as possible. Mix with the cucumber.

Mix one package of shrimp powder, one teaspoon of sugar and half a teaspoon of chilipowder in enough lemon (or lime) juice and fish sauce to disolve it. Mix with the cucumber and onion and let stand about 15 minutes before eating.

You can also add crushed peanuts and/or cilantro.

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1. Clarissa
  
  June 30, 2015
  “Also almost any cold dish that is not entirely meat, cheese or fish is liable to be called a salad.”
  
  Just like in Ukraine. 🙂
  
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Stringer Bell

June 30, 2015

“Maybe I should buy one because I don’t eat more beans only because it takes forever to cook them and I don’t always have time.”

Yeah, it’s ideal for that.

We do a lot of one-pot dishes. Saute some garlic in oil with seasonings. Drop big chunks of carrot/potatoes/peas/spinach/whatever veg you like into the pressure cooker with lentils or beans. Add water. By the time the lentils are cooked, the veggies have been softened in the flavorful broth. Garnish with cilantro/parsley/olive oil/butter.

Takes 10 minutes if the lentils have been soaking previously. Depending on the type of lentils/beans, even if they haven’t been soaked at all they cook in 15-20 minutes.

It’s a complete meal.

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Stille (@aperfectbalance)

June 30, 2015

Bake some beetroots, peel and dice them. Add 1-2 carrots’ worth of carrot shavings (I use a potato peeler for that), a bunch of walnut bits, some goat cheese/feta/similar (should be white, salty-crumbly and flavourful) and quite a bit of chopped fresh spinach. Toss until mixed properly. Use an olive oil/balsamic vinegar vinaigrette.

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Z

July 1, 2015

Soup, main dish, salad, cheese, fruit, coffee. Unless there are two main dishes, a fish and then a meat course, or a rice/pasta and then a meat/fish course.

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Z

July 1, 2015

Also, I thought the salad first thing was something restaurants had invented, so you could be amused with salad while they cooked. It was never something done at home, to my knowledge — at home, really, on a normal day, you would have everything all together.

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1. cliff arroyo
  
  July 1, 2015
  
  I thought the same thing about restaurants.
  
  I think that salad first is also because a tossed salad doesn’t work well on a plate with other stuff (takes up too much space and the dressing will leech into other stuff) and kind of needs its own bowl so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have it with everything else.
  
  I’m trying to remember what we did at home (where we had a lot of tossed salads). I’m thinking we started with salad but it did kind of blend in with the rest of the meal. After the first bowl of salad you could keep the salad bowl next to your plate and refill it if you wanted.
  
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  1. Z
    
    July 1, 2015
    
    We just let it leech into the other stuff, which was a piece of meat. But in more formal meals — a salad plate.
    
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Z

July 1, 2015

Vinegar and sugar: http://www.pvga.net/recipes/cucumbersalad.html

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Z

July 1, 2015

Also, are you sure vinegar and sugar always meant no oil? My mother and grandmother always made a salad dressing like this: http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/sugar-and-vinegar-dressing

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