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

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Joys and History of Eating

    

“The great Alexandre Dumas, in his Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine, insisted that salad is not a natural food for man.” Had he never tried a Shrimp Louie?!?”

In a chapter titled “After The Fork,” for example, the book discloses that three things revolutionized eating habits during the 17th century: the fork, the plate and the potato. It was in 1100 that a lady from Constantinople caused a furor in Venice by picking up her food with a two-pronged device instead of her fingers, as was customary. But not until 1500 did the fork come into general use in Italy and Spain; and in England and the rest of Europe not until 100 years after that.

The first plate was used in England in 1641; before that, food was piled into a scooped-out loaf of bread called a “trencher”; and that, too was eaten. And the potato, brought to Spain from America in the late 1500’s, was at first a rather suspect novelty, then a luxury in France, and later an absolute necessity for survival throughout Europe.

All this and much more come to life in these pages: observations on the first use of the table napkin, the niceties (and vulgarities) of serving food and consuming it; and such piquant facts that the great Alexandre Dumas, in his Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine, insisted that salad is not a natural food for man.

Which brings me to the book's visual delights: its dozens of drawings, sketches, illustrations and reproductions in superb color of renowned paintings of all ages and cultures related to various aspects of cookery, table settings, meat carving, meals of the humble and the mighty. There is not a page of these graphics combined with the text that will not hold your attention and charm you.

And as a grand finale, there is a section of 68 pages of recipes. But what recipes! Roman, Greek and old European; as well as Asian, Middle East and Early American, with full instructions on how to duplicate the original ingredients into modern counterparts. Here are opportunities for you to try to create a dish of the time of Caesar or Socrates; Ptolemy, or a Samurai war-lord or the Pennsylvania Dutch.

This is a splendid book. Whether or not you cook, surely you eat, and “The Joy of Eating” will give you joy. – From a 1997 book review by Jane Barry Williams

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia