The Science of Salads

An assortment of Gilded Age salad forks, lettuce serving forks and one lettuce serving spoon — “Alexandre Dumas devotes more than 1,000 words in his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine to demonstrating that salad is not natural food for man. Only ruminants, he writes, are equipped to deal with raw greenery in their stomachs, since raw plants are dissolved not by acids but by alkalis. It is, he says, an excess of civilization that has made us take to eating raw salads. The ultimate error is to make salad accompany a roast. To eat salad with haunch of venison, or with roast pheasant or woodcock is simply culinary heresy. One spoils the other.”

The rights and wrongs of the science of dining seem to arouse passions as much as politics or bridge, and nothing is more controversial than the right way to dress a salad.

Alexandre Dumas devotes more than 1,000 words in his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine to demonstrating that salad is not natural food for man. Only ruminants, he writes, are equipped to deal with raw greenery in their stomachs, since raw plants are dissolved not by acids but by alkalis. It is, he says, an excess of civilization that has made us take to eating raw salads. The ultimate error is to make salad accompany a roast. To eat salad with haunch of venison, or with roast pheasant or woodcock is simply culinary heresy. One spoils the other. 

All game of haut gout, he considers, ought to be eaten by itself just with the sauce of its own juices. It is an act of great culinary impiety to allow your salad to be made by a servant. Salad is served at a moment when hunger is three-quarters assuaged and you need an aperitif to restore your appetite and thus it has to be perfect, prepared with loving skill and intelligence. Where, the inference is, will you find this except in the master or mistress of the house? And so the salad must be composed by one of them and at least an hour before it is due to be served. During that hour it should be turned three or four times.

Salad consists of vegetables to which certain aromatic herbs have been added, seasoned with salt, white pepper, oil, vinegar and sometimes with mustard and soya. Herbs, again, are of three kinds: pot-herbs, dressing-herbs and seasonings. There are six pot-herbs: sorrel, lettuce, white beet, mountain spinach (orach) spinach and purslane. Dressing- herbs are parsley, tarragon, chervil, chive, spring onion, savory, fennel, thyme, basil and tansy. There are twelve seasoning-herbs: garden cress, watercress, chervil, tarragon, burnet, samphire, hartshorn, lesser basil, purslane, balm and chives. When seasoning chicory you put at the bottom of the salad bowl a stale crust of bread rubbed with garlic to absorb surplus vinegar.

Until recently salad-dressing seems to have been a peculiarly French accomplishment. After the Revolution several of the aristocratic refugees in England and America made fortunes as salad-dressers. In London, a young man called d'Aubignac accumulated £80,000 in quite a short period from the exercise of this skill, in which he seems to have used considerable imagination, as he is said to have used perfumed vinegars, oils tasting of fruit, soy, ketchup and even caviare among his ingredients. — From “The Joy of Eating,” by Katie Stewart, 1937

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