Salad
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Salad is a light meal - or part of a larger meal - consisting of mixed vegetables or fruit, often with a dressing or sauce, occasionally nuts and the possibility of meat/fish/cheese on the side. It is usually seen as a healthy meal though this can be misleading - often a dressing is full of calories, salt, sugar or fat.
The word "salad" comes from the French salade of the same meaning, from the Latin salata, "salty", from sal, "salt". (See also sauce, salsa, sausage.)
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[edit] The green salad
The "green salad" is most often composed of a mixture of uncooked or cold cooked vegetables, built up on a base of leaf vegetables such as one or more lettuce varieties, spinach, or arugula.
Other common vegetables in a green salads include tomato, cucumber, peppers, mushroom, onion, spring onion, red onion, carrot and radish. Other ingredients such as pasta, olives, cooked potatoes, rice, beans, croutons, meat (e.g. bacon, chicken), cheese, or fish (e.g. tuna) are sometimes added to salads.
[edit] Dressings
A green salad is often served with a dressing. Some examples include:
The concept of salad dressing varies across cultures. There are many commonly used salad dressings in North America. Traditional dressings in southern Europe are vinaigrettes, while mayonnaise is predominant in eastern European countries and Russia. In Denmark dressings are often based on crème fraîche. In China, where Western salad is a recent adoption from Western cuisine, the term salad dressing (沙拉酱, shalajiang) tends to refer to mayonnaise or mayonnaise-based dressings.
[edit] Garnishes
There are various vegetables and other fare that are often added to green salad. Some of them are:
- shelled sunflower seeds
- onions (mostly the red variety)
- bacon bits (sometimes the bits are artificially flavored pieces of textured soybean protein)
- radishes
- grated carrots
- tomatoes
- surimi - artificial crab meat
- cucumbers
- bell peppers
Again, individual taste usually governs the choice of salad garnishes.
[edit] Other types of salad
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Some salads are based on food items other than fresh vegetables:
- Antipasto salad
- Bean salad
- Chicken salad
- Coleslaw
- Congealed salad
- Egg salad
- Fruit salad
- Glasgow salad
- Israeli salad
- Larb from Laos
- Pasta salad
- Potato salad
- Russian salad
- Ivanov Salad
- Shopska salad from Bulgaria
- Somen salad from Japan
- Som tam (Thai ส้มตำ) or Green Papaya Salad from Thailand
- Tabouli
- Taco salad
- Tuna salad
- Waldorf salad
- Watergate salad
[edit] History
During the Middle Ages, after eating mostly salted meats and pickled vegetables all winter, people would be "salt-sick" and looked forward to spring greens. Popular history asserts that peasants ate more salads than lords,and were the healthier for it. In fact salads, cooked and raw, included many ingredients that would be considered "gourmet" today: lovage, burnet, sorrel.
The diarist John Evelyn wrote a book on salads, Acetaria: A Discourse on Sallets (1699), that describes the new salad greens like "sellery" (celery), coming out of Italy and the Netherlands.
[edit] External links
