Salad

Tonight, I had to have a salad.  It wasn't a want at all-- my body just insisted!  So I mixed up some fresh Arkansas field greens, strawberries, blueberries, pecans, and goat cheese then topped it all with a balsamic vinaigrette. Salad is one of my most favorite foods to eat, so I decided to see where the word comes from for our blog.  

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, it ultimately from the past participle of the Latin verb sal, to salt, salare. This is because salt is a crucial ingredient in many salad dressings, and has been since the days of the Romans. The dish and word were passed along to Old French, and then to Middle English. The OED tells us that salad was first printed in 1390 in a cookbook called Forme of Cury.  The sentence in which it appears read "Take persel, sawge, garlec [etc.]..waische hem clene..andmyng hem wel with rawe oile, lay on vyneger and salt, and serue it forth."  It turns out that salads haven't changed much since the word entered our tongue.  I believe it must be because they're so darn good! Why fix what isn't broken?

Our salad has many cognate siblings in other Latinate languages, such as Portuguese. We also get our words sauce and salsa from the related Latin adjective salsus, meaning "salted", and our word sausage from the Late Latin word salsicius, meaning "prepared by salting" (American Heritage Dictionary.)