[Sca-cooks] Serving salads

[Daniel Myers]

On Thursday, December 4, 2003, at 07:11  PM, Harris Mark.S-rsve60 wrote:

> In Anne-Marie's recent list of period/period-like food items which 
> could be picked up from the grocery store, she mentioned:
> "--green salad from a salad bar or in a bag, with a vineagrette 
> dressing on the side" and that made me wonder just how salads were 
> served in period.
>
> The meat was often sliced at the table by the server, not generaly by 
> the guest or previously by the kitchen. So, I'm wondering if the same 
> applies to salads. Again, I can see three possiblities:
> 1) topped? tossed? in the kitchen with the dressing
> 2) topped at the table by the server
> 3) topped at the table by the guest.
>
> Do we know from feast or possibly salad descriptions how it was done? 
> This may be in the salad-msg file in the Florilegium, but I haven't 
> looked.

A couple of references I've come across suggest that salads were 
prepared in the kitchen and served already dressed.

In "Fast and Feast", Bridget Ann Henisch quotes Cotsgrave's 
"Dictionarie" (1611) under "salade":  "a Sallet without wine is raw, 
unwholesome, dangerous."

I'm still looking for another one that I came across quite a while back 
which quoted someone complaining about the salads made by the English 
(I think).  The gist of the complaint was that they didn't properly 
wash all the dirt from the greens, didn't dry them off well enough 
which left them soggy, and then they drowned the greens in way too much 
vinegar.  If I can locate this one then I'll post it - for some reason 
I keep thinking it was in a book by Peter Brears.

- Doc


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  Daniel Myers
  http://www.thegoatinthegarden.com/
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