Salads, Colonists, and Salad Forks

Though salad knives made their official debut in the 1920’s, salad forks were showing up on dining tables and in silver catalogs from 1885 on, so they were created right around the time that salads were making a resurgence in the U.S., as noted by Fannie Farmer in 1896. Salads “are now made in an endless variety of ways, and are composed of meat, fish, vegetables (alone or in combination) or fruits, with the addition of a dressing,” said Fannie.

Colonists brought salads to America and the Gilded Age brought salad forks to the table

With the earliest English colonists, and throughout the colonial period, kitchen gardens were tended in part for the wonderful salad ingredients they produced. Perhaps due to the urbanization and industrialization of America during the late 19th century, there was a falling off in the appreciation of salad. But by the 1890s they were gaining popularity again. 

Fannie Farmer commented in the 1896 edition of “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book” that “Salads, which constitute a course in almost every dinner, but a few years since seldom appeared on the table. They are now made in an endless variety of ways, and are composed of meat, fish, vegetables (alone or in combination) or fruits, with the addition of a dressing,” said Fannie.

Once again Americans seem to be rediscovering salads the way they did in Fanny Farmer's day. John Evelyn would be delighted to learn that the American salad bowl is once again overflowing with delicate herbs, greens, wild mushrooms, flower petals, and a wide variety of other imaginative ingredients that bring delight to the eye as well as the taste buds.— Desert Sun, 1988

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

Marie Antoinette’s Etiquette vs Anglomania

“For my own part, I prefer to eat lettuce salad with my fingers rather than with a fork, and Queen Marie Antoinette and other ladies of the Eighteenth century were of my way of thinking. If the ladies could only see how pretty is their gesture when their diaphanous forefinger and thumb grasps a leaf of delicate green lettuce, and raises that leaf from the porcelain plate to their rosy lips, they would all immediately take to eating salad à la Marie Antoinette.”
– Photo of Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette from Pinterest 

Anglomania in Eating 

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Some Plain Talk About the Finicky Ways of “Overly Dainty” People

The Anglo-Saxons are afraid to use their fingers to eat with, especially the English. Thanks to this hesitation, I have seen in the course of my travels in the Old World, many distressing sights. I have seen a lady attempt to eat crawfish (écrevisse) with a knife and fork, and abandon the attempt in despair. I have also seen men in the same fix. I have seen—oh, barbarous and cruel spectacle!—Anglo-Saxons, otherwise apparently civilized, cut off the points of asparagus, and eat these points only with a fork, thus leaving the best part of the vegetable on their plates. As for artichokes, they generally utterly defeat the attacks of those who trust only to the knife and fork. 

Fingers must be used for eating certain things, notably asparagus, artichokes, fruit, olives, radishes, pastry, and even small fried fish; In short, everything which will not dirty or grease the fingers may be eaten with the fingers. For my own part, I prefer to eat lettuce salad with my fingers rather than with a fork, and Queen Marie Antoinette and other ladies of the Eighteenth century were of my way of thinking. If the ladies could only see how pretty is their gesture when their diaphanous forefinger and thumb grasps a leaf of delicate green lettuce, and raises that leaf from the porcelain plate to their rosy lips, they would all immediately take to eating salad à la Marie Antoinette. Only bear in mind, good ladies, that if you do wish to eat lettuce salad with your fingers, you must mix your salad with oil and vinegar, and not with that abominable ready-made, white “salad dressing,” to look upon which is nauseating. 

May heaven preserve us from excessive Anglomania in matters of table service and eating. The English tend to complicate the eating tools far too much. They have too many forks for comfort, and the forms of them are too quaint for practical utility. Certainly silver dessert knives and forks are very good in their way, because they are not susceptible to the action of fruit acids, but it is vain and clumsy to attempt to make too exclusive use of the knife and fork in eating fruit. Don’t imitate, for instance, certain ultra-correct English damsels who eat cherries with a fork and swallow the stones because they are too modest, or rather too asinine, to set them out on to the plate. Eating is not a thing to be ashamed of. 

To thoroughly enjoy a peach you must bite it, and feel the juicy perfumed flesh melt in your mouth. But let the Anglomaniacs say what they please, there is no necessity of sticking a fork into the peach, and peeling it while so impaled, as if it were an ill-favored and foul object. A peach is as beautiful to the touch as it is to the eye; a peach held between human fingers has its beauty enhanced by the beauty of the fingers. However dainty and ornate the silver dessert knife and fork may be, it always irritates me to see people out up their peaches, or pears, or apricots, or what not, into cubes and parallelepipeds, as if dessert were a branch of conic sections. 

Imitate Marie Antoinette, ladies; use your fingers more freely: eat decently, of course, but do not be the slave of silly Anglomania or Newport crazes. To eat a pair or an apple conveniently, cut it into quarters, and peel each quarter in turn as you eat it. The  peach, too, can be cut into quarters, if the eater is timid. Apricots do not need peeling, nor plums either. Would you be bold enough to peel a fresh fig, or to touch such a delicate fruit even with the purest silver instruments? —Theodore Child in Harper’s Bazar, 1890

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

Salad Etiquette and History

Originally, long lettuce forks and matching spoons were the proper accoutrements for serving salads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eventually, by the mid 20th century, they became connected, made of plastic and mass marketed as “salad tongs,” though those who took much pride in entertaining, continued to use separate salad serving forks and spoons to serve their guests leafy, green salads.

To paint a complete portrait of the restaurant’s history, the iconic image of Man Carving a Roast should be accompanied by Man Mixing a Salad. For in haute restaurant-ology it is Man, not Woman, who rules the salad bowl.


In the 19th century wealthy men who styled themselves epicures often impressed their dining companions by rising from the table and mixing the salad. In the 20th century the custom passed into the hands of headwaiters at chi chi venues.

The tradition can be traced to peripatetic Frenchmen who wandered around Europe solemnly ministering to urban dinner parties with the contents of their small yet sacred chests of salad ingredients which included flavored vinegars, soy, caviar, truffles, anchovies, and other delectables.

In the 18th century sallad (spelled in the British manner) referred to a mixture of greens and herbs, possibly radishes, dressed with vinegar and oil and perhaps a raw egg. It could also mean chopped cabbage, known in the early 19th century as “cold” slaw. How many taverns, coffee houses, and other early eating places served salads is unknown but the number was probably very small and their salad days limited to springtime.

Although some green salads appeared on 19th century menus, the word salad more often referred to cold chopped meat or fish dressed with mayonnaise. Lobster and chicken were favorites. Combination salads and fruit salads did not come into popularity until the 20th century, largely due no doubt to the lower price of greens, vegetables, and imported bananas and pineapples.

The type of restaurant that did most to advance the green salad as a basic component of the American diet was the table d’hôte, a small French or Italian restaurant serving a fixed-price meal of about five courses. In 1844, patrons at the Café Tortoni in NYC enjoyed dinners of soup, stew-like entrees, roast meat, salads “mixed a la des Jardins,” and desserts. Head lettuce was rare, so typical salads featured romaine, chicory, dandelions, or field greens. Salad lovers particularly lauded Italian restaurants for their salads, both in the 19th and 20th centuries (despite the common appellation “Wop salad” ca. 1940-1970). In 1909 a patron wrote that Italian restaurant salads “are almost always good, and the dressing, made from red wine vinegar, is usually delicious. The mixed salad, in spring includes tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, celery, sometimes spinach and usually chives. Beet tops are also served as salad.”

In the New England countryside, on the other hand, salads were rare – and unsatisfactory. As a patron in a hotel dining room noted in 1881, “If by any chance there is lettuce on the table – for this happens rarely – and you manifest a desire to eat of it, the waiter puts before you the vinegar cruet and the sugar bowl. If you want to make a fool of yourself, call for salad oil. It will take some time to explain your meaning, and when you have done so the attendant will sneeringly inform her companions that ‘That feller eats grease on his lettis.’”

Although some thought salads were gaining popularity in the 1890s as sedentary city dwellers woke up to the wisdom of lighter fare, hotel cook Jessup Whitehead remarked in 1901 that “salads are not among the common popular dishes, and the average public seldom seems to think of them.” Many cooks had no idea how to prepare them, he added.


Salads became feminized in the 1920s. Perhaps it was the popularity of fruit salads in tea rooms, or the increasing use of flavored gelatin salads, but some male gourmets denounced women for preferring “comic salads” chosen for eye appeal rather than taste. Indeed there were some bizarre ones such as the Candlestick (illustrated), and others with names such as Clara Barton, Bon Ton, Butterfly, and Martini. Even a female tea room proprietor had to admit that “Atrocities have been committed in the name of salad.”

In the mid-20th century the tossed salad smothered under a layer of thick dressing became the standard start of a regulation meat and potatoes restaurant dinner. The high incidence of mediocre salads led syndicated columnist Inez Robb to launch a one-woman campaign in the 1960s against the two-pronged “red menace” to restaurant salads: chopped red cabbage and sludgy red-orange “French” dressing. Relief was on the way, for in the 1970s field greens returned, and ingredients rarely (but sometimes) found in salads of previous decades, such as olive oil, radicchio, and arugula came into wider use.–© Jan Whitaker, 2011

Jan Whitaker

We wish to thank Jan Whitaker for her allowing us to use another wonderful post from her blog. Says Jan, “We eat in restaurants several times a week and yet know very little about their history. I plan to dip into my archive of research and images every so often to present a little tidbit that highlights aspects of our American restaurant culture. Let me know your thoughts”- Restaurant-ing Through History

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