302 JOURNAL OF THE EOYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



SALADS AND SALAD-MAKING. 

 By 0. Herman Senn, G.O.A., A.I.J. 



[Read September 26, 1911.] 



Salad-making and salad-eating are habits of great antiquity. TJie 

 Eomans knew how to appreciate a good salad, but their methods o! 

 salad-dressing would hardly appeal to modern palates; for oil, ginger, 

 honey, nitre, and the ubiquitous " garum " (a sauce made of the gills 

 of various pickled fish) were amongst the favourite ingredients. The 

 Eomans were in the habit of eating salad at the beginning of a meal 

 as a kind of hors d'oeuvre, under the idea that it stimulated the 

 appetite, a custom which was followed by our own country during the 

 Middle Ages, and this custom has of late become fashionable again. 



The enormous range of herbs grown in England in Elizabethan 

 days, made salad dishes particularly acceptable to our ancestors. It 

 is true that ordinary vegetables were but little eaten, owing to ignorance 

 of the proper methods of cultivation; but, on the other hand, the supply 

 of salad herbs was far more plentiful than nowadays. Gerard, the 

 herbalist, quotes more than thirty as being in general use, viz., Spanish 

 pepper, onion, leek, chives, garlic, turuip-tops, winter cresses, rocket, 

 tarragon, various cresses, garden succory, dandelion leaves, endive, 

 lettuces (wild and cultivated), beet, spinach, Orache or Atriplex, dock 

 leaves, sorrel, roots of rampion, lesser house-leeks, purslane, sampler 

 leaves, brook-lime or water pimpernel, borage, bugloss leaves, hop 

 sprouts, garden burnet, leaves of musk roses and rosemary. Further 

 mention is made in culinary manuscripts of that period of avens or 

 herb bennet, costmary, cultivated in the Middle Ages for the agreeable 

 fragrance of its leaves, dittany, an aromatic plant, hyssop, savoury, 

 tansy, mallow, and pellitory. How many of the above are used in 

 the kitchen nowadays? These herbs were eaten particularly in the 

 spring-time, for the majority of them were believed to have medicinal 

 properties of especial value to the system after the salt-meat diet of 

 the winter months. 



The name of John Evelyn naturally rises in connexion with the 

 salads of the past. He it was who, once for all, laid down the true 

 principles of salad-making in his Acetaria, " and no later authority 

 has materially improved upon his theories. Distinguishing between 

 "olera," vegetables for the pot, which should never be eaten raw, 

 and "acetaria, " vegetables which should never be boiled, Evelyn 

 declared that to cook a salad by heat or by any slow process of pickling 

 was to deprive it utterly of its essential qualities. He declined to 

 regard fruits as an ingredient in salads, and he certainly knew nothing 

 of the modern combinations of nuts, cheese, fish, eggs, game, and 

 poultry. As regards the dressing, he was of the opinion that an 



