2722: Salads and Salt Jun 3, 2024

Looking for a low-sodium food item? Try a salad, derived from the Latin for ‘salt’, ‘saltum’. This is because the Roman (herba) salata would be in a salt brine, more like kimchi than a typical garden salad, or for that matter Caesar salad. 

Of course, even now, the default ‘salad’ in the modern mind may involve some kind of base with a leafy green, the word extends to plenty of completely unrelated salads, like ‘bulgur salad’ or pasta salad, which are mostly wheat, and tuna-, chicken-, and potato salads are majority comprised of what their names suggest. This begs the question then why ‘salad’, unmodified, is thought of as green? 

Salad, as a distinct dish, really seems to have solidified in 16th century Western Europe into the modern definitions and connotations. The notion of salad being green and fresh can be seen in the phrase “salad days” i.e. one’s youth, first recorded in Shakespeare’s 1606 "Antony and Cleopatra", reflecting the practice of using fresh vegetables as opposed to the salted, pickled ones, which ironically the real Mark Antony and Cleopatra would not have called a salad.