In hot climates cooks prepare salads that use cooked or marinated ingredients and, less

frequently, raw but peeled vegetables. For example, Indonesian gado-gado salad includes scalded

cabbage, water spinach, (a local green-leaf plant), cooked potatoes, blanched green beans and

stir-fried bean curd. All ingredients are combined with a cooked peanut dressing. Every

ingredients is safe from contamination. Gado-gado is not what we traditionally call salad, but is

served cold as a salad, and is perfectly safe to eat, even by weak-stomached Americans from the

U.S. Midwest. And it is hearty enough to be a meal in itself.

The ingredient of another hot climate example, Middle-Eastern tabouli salad, is cooked

bulgur wheat (cracked wheat grains) with a type of dressing that is very close to French

vinaigrette. The acidity of the vinaigrette dressing creates a hostile environment to potential

contamination. The only raw parts of this salad, parsley and mint, are ingredients in small

quantities, not in amounts like lettuce and tomato in our salads. Even if the parsley and mint are

not perfectly safe, the amount you eat is so minute that it is not likely to harm you.

By normal definition a salad contains tossed greens or fruits. These ingredients are by far

the easiest to prepare. Just cut up several kinds of fresh produce in any ratio, mix, apply prepared

dressing and serve. It is hard to imagine a course easier to make, looks as nice and is so full of

nutrition than one of these tossed salads. No wonder they are served so often.

There is only one problem with these traditional salads. Served often, they tend to get

monotonous to a discriminating eater.

What makes a salad a salad?

Salads consist of two parts. The body that can be any basic food, cooked or raw and the

dressing (the fashionable term is sauce). The dressing is either applied just before serving or, if it

is to marinate the ingredients, hours before. When you dress the salad just before serving, the

dressing is meant to provide flavor and mouthfeel to the otherwise mild crunchy vegetables.

If the dressing is a marinade, it can take several hours or several days to alter the flavors,

textures and consistency of the foods that make up the salad.

Ordinary tossed green lettuce salads are considered passé in today's food circles and

better restaurants. The trend is to mix unusual combinations or exotic, wild, even unheard-of

ingredients. The new rule is, if no deaths have been directly attributed to a plant material and it

looks out of the ordinary, add it to the salad bowl. Anything edible, from tiny flowers to furry

twigs, flavorful to bland, bitter to sweet, has been, or at this very moment is being tried. Vivid

colors, curly shapes and wispy, twisted textures are all in demand.

Some of the more established nouvelle cuisine ingredients include dried tomato,

radicchio, chicory, fiddlehead ferns, all kinds of sprouts, arugula, mâche, dandelion, endive,

sorrel, baby vegetables and baby greens, flowers and herbs.

Combined with the basic salad fixings, these ingredients create beautiful and appetizing

plates with minimal additional work for the cook. But how to find them and how much they are

going to set you back at the checkout counter is another problem. They are certainly not for the

everyday meal.

Different Purpose—Different Ingredients

The use for salads today actually goes far beyond the first course. We can break down

today's salads into four general types.

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