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where do salads come from
Jun. 1st, 2024 09:14 pmreally, where do salads come from?
"what are we having for dinner tonight" you ask, and i answer "boeuf bourguignon," and we're pretty clear on where that dish came from. and we can get plenty more particular than "france."
we can't get so specific, but have a pretty good idea. it's from paris in the late 1800s, probably a bistro invention, not from burgundy but marketed using the burgundian reputation for good meat and wine. personally I feel fine about that answer. good enough for me! the general rule is: foods we call "traditional" are about seventy years old when they reach "traditional" status, and were invented by some cook with a good marketing sense.
(it would have been totally normal, for instance, for your italian mother AND grandmother to have never heard of ciabatta growing up; let alone tiramisu. and when i was a kid having instant ramen for the first time, plenty of working japanese chefs probably still regarded it as a new fad.)
but where is salad from? what kind of cuisine is it? we can trace the provenance of pasta, lagh'mon, and soba, but where in hell is salad from. is it french food? italian? salad is just kind of there.
it's roman food. that's rare! we almost never encounter roman food in our day-to-day lives. the closest might be "we also drink wine and eat bread" and "we also use fish sauce" but that's convergent evolution (bread and wine were made thousands of years before rome; fish sauce developed independently in a number of places), not the influence of rome on our diet.
salad is one of those uncommon foods that has a single unbroken lineage from rome to us. apicius was writing down very modern-sounding vinaigrettes with honey and olive oil. our word "salad" is from vulgar roman "herba salata," salted herbs.
and when the roman empire split people just kept making salads. wherever there had been romans, people made salads to their local taste. in the latin west salads were sort of relegated to fast days, but in the byzantine empire they never lost a minute (the things that became fattoush! greek salad!), and in medieval spain and renaissance italy salads were back to full popularity.
these days we have regionalisms—salade niçoise, ceasar salad, waldorf salad—but mostly, when you eat salad, you're eating roman food.
"what are we having for dinner tonight" you ask, and i answer "boeuf bourguignon," and we're pretty clear on where that dish came from. and we can get plenty more particular than "france."
we can't get so specific, but have a pretty good idea. it's from paris in the late 1800s, probably a bistro invention, not from burgundy but marketed using the burgundian reputation for good meat and wine. personally I feel fine about that answer. good enough for me! the general rule is: foods we call "traditional" are about seventy years old when they reach "traditional" status, and were invented by some cook with a good marketing sense.
(it would have been totally normal, for instance, for your italian mother AND grandmother to have never heard of ciabatta growing up; let alone tiramisu. and when i was a kid having instant ramen for the first time, plenty of working japanese chefs probably still regarded it as a new fad.)
but where is salad from? what kind of cuisine is it? we can trace the provenance of pasta, lagh'mon, and soba, but where in hell is salad from. is it french food? italian? salad is just kind of there.
it's roman food. that's rare! we almost never encounter roman food in our day-to-day lives. the closest might be "we also drink wine and eat bread" and "we also use fish sauce" but that's convergent evolution (bread and wine were made thousands of years before rome; fish sauce developed independently in a number of places), not the influence of rome on our diet.
salad is one of those uncommon foods that has a single unbroken lineage from rome to us. apicius was writing down very modern-sounding vinaigrettes with honey and olive oil. our word "salad" is from vulgar roman "herba salata," salted herbs.
and when the roman empire split people just kept making salads. wherever there had been romans, people made salads to their local taste. in the latin west salads were sort of relegated to fast days, but in the byzantine empire they never lost a minute (the things that became fattoush! greek salad!), and in medieval spain and renaissance italy salads were back to full popularity.
these days we have regionalisms—salade niçoise, ceasar salad, waldorf salad—but mostly, when you eat salad, you're eating roman food.
