'Theme and Variation' 5 and a Wordstalk! And Looking for a Job.

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Theme

This week's 'theme and variations' piece is probably the ultimate and most quintessentially 'variable' item of them all, and also subject for a 'wordstalk' that will come out just from talking about it. This food isn't a single food item, but in its various forms almost everyone eats it, no matter their dietary preference. Of course, I'm talking about SALAD!

The basic 'theme' with salad is generally considered to be a collection of vegetables with a dressing on it. This can be, and has been, extended so that pretty much every food group can take a bow in a salad bowl in some form, whether shredded (like cheese, carrots and other hard veggies), chopped (carrots, lettuce, avocado, tomatoes, fruit, etc), boiled (eggs, potatoes), toasted (bread, nuts) whipped (eggs, avocado, tahini), or fermented (sauerkraut, pickles, olives, capers).

And therein lies a succinct description of many of the possible variations.

However, before I get into my favorite variations, let's do the Wordstalk piece.

See, the word salad, in its glorious nonspecificity, conveys such a tight and yet such a precisely defined area of food, but such a word wasn't even used in the times of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, who ate a lot of fresh vegetables, and in fact the common denominator which is all that 'salad' denotes is the salt - i.e. the flavoring of the dressing! So perhaps a naked salad isn't really a salad!

Not a lot of people realize that salad etymologizes directly as 'salted,' cognate with 'salsa' and also 'salacious' (to Roman sensibilities, adding some salt to something connoted being at least witty and probably risque too). And it may be questionable how relevant the etymology is to salad as we think of it nowadays. (It's an interesting question of its own how important etymologies are to actual current meanings. Some people inveigh against 'abuses' of words being used outside of their etymological context; others welcome this as organic extension of the language's flexibility.) 

In terms of the extension of the word's use, in theoretical Linguistics, 'word salad' refers to a string of words that make no syntactic sense (especially in a language that relies on word order for syntax), and although I haven't been able to track it down, I do remember it being used of a piece of music with a lot of different parts to it.

To make things a little more confusing, in German 'salat' simply means 'lettuce.' I remember when I used to sell produce being confused by a German customer asking for 'a salad,' when we weren't serving any salads, and then a blink later realizing that of course she wanted a head of lettuce. And in English too, a lot of green vegetables are called 'x salad' or 'salad x'  (e.g. 'corn salad,' an alternate name for lambsquarters/mache, and 'salad burnet,' a green that grows wild up here in Alaska and is mostly eaten by spring bears, but that I've also grown in California, with a lightly cucumber taste). But it's usually pretty obvious when it's being used in a 'specific' context, and otherwise variety rules!

Variations

I found it interesting to read about the 'Home Economics' movement in the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries being so concerned with constraining and tidying the food, so that 'salad could not be the wildly exuberant spreading, heaping smorgasbord of all kinds of food that many of us know and love. It was useful to understand some of the aesthetics that lay behind the 'molded/gelled' salad (which I'd never seen before I came to the US and find pretty abhorrent, especially when it's made with lurid green jell-o). The American salads that consist of loads of mayonnaise drenching tuna/celery/capers/peppers probably owe something to the same aesthetic. 

However, what's called 'salad' in the Mediterranean and Middle East is often more like this, or even closer to what we would think of as a dip: baba ghanoush, hummus, taramasalata (NB 'salata') are all considered salads over there. 

I have actually found myself making gelled salads a few times. If you chop in a bunch of okra, within minutes it'll be gelled! Seaweeds work that way too. And I have mixed chia seeds into a salad, especially if it's 'to go' in a trusty mason jar. 

I love to use wild greens - nettles, chickweed, dandelions, wild mustard greens, and here in Alaska there are a whole set of greens that grown only along the shoreline. They tend to taste strong and a little goes a long way, but they're great in a salad. 

Tomatoes or other juicy fruits are great in salads. Phil and I aren't big fans of cucumber but apples or even nectarines or grapefruit pieces (no fruit for me at the moment, though) give a satisfying crunch and moisture. I adore jicama for the same things, but I love it so much that I tend to just munch on it beside the salad. 

I'm trying to get my krauting and sprouting routines down so that I always have both of them: kraut and sprouts are wonderful on salads. I have coconut kefir going pretty consistently, and like to have some of that with salad also, and often use the whey in salad dressings.

But to be honest, my salad is almost always a bunch of greens, a little sliced avocado, kraut and sprouts, a little oil and vinegar, and then a bunch of kefir whey and spirulina/chlorella mixed all over.  It would probably be good to vary that up some! I'm in the process of deciding/recognizing that we can't afford to buy avocados, so probably more seed cheeses and kefirs in the salad. And I'm going to look for a job.