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Salad is a term applied broadly to many food preparations that are a mixture of chopped or sliced ingredients. A salad can be served cold or at room temperature, although it can also form the filling for a sandwich. Though it can be made with meat or eggs, it usually includes at least one raw vegetable or fruit. Often it is prepared or served with a dressing.

A salad may be served before or after the main dish as a separate course, as a main course in itself, or as a side dish.

Salad may refer to a blended food item— often meat, seafood or eggs blended with mayonnaise, finely chopped vegetables and seasonings— which can be served as part of a green salad or used as a sandwich filling. Salads of this kind include egg, chicken, tuna, shrimp, and ham salad.

In Scandinavia, salad also refers to a blend of vegetables in a dressing used as a condiment on top of the open sandwich, smørrebrød, and with meats. Examples include cucumber salad, horseradish salad, Italian salad (a mixture of vegetables in a crème fraîche/mayonnaise dressing, served on ham), and Russian salad (a red beet salad).

The word "salad" comes from the French salade of the same meaning, from the Latin salata, "salty", from sal, "salt". (See also sauce, salsa, sausage.)

The green salad

The "green salad" is most often composed of a mixture of uncooked or cold, cooked vegetables, built up on a base of leaf vegetables such as one or more lettuce varieties, spinach, or arugula.

Other common vegetables in a green salad include tomato, cucumber, peppers, mushroom, onion, spring onion, carrot and radish. Other food items such as pasta, olives, cooked potatoes, rice, beans, croutons, meat (e.g. bacon, chicken), cheese, or fish (e.g. tuna) are sometimes added to salads.

Types of green salad

Caesar salad
Chef salad
Cobb salad
Greek salad
Hawaiian salad
Italian salad
- Rocket salad (rucola)
- Agretti salad
- Radicchio salad
French Salad
- Spring Salad
- Mesclun salad
- Provençale salad
- Niçoise salad
- Chèvre chaud salad
- Gésier salad
- Mâche salad
- Cuncumber salad
- Antillaise salad
- Watercress salad
Tossed salad

Dressings

A green salad is often served with a dressing. Some examples include:

Conception of salad dressing vary across culture. Common salad dressings in North American tend to be very broad. Traditional dressings in southern Europe were vinaigrettes. In China, where Western salad is a recent adoption from Western cuisine, the term salad dressing (沙拉酱, shalajiang) tends to refer predominantly to mayonnaise or mayonnaise-based dressings.

Garnishes

There are various vegetables and other fare that are often added to green salad. Some of them are:

shelled sunflower seeds
onions (mostly the red variety)
bacon bits (sometimes the bits are artificially flavored pieces of textured soybean protein)
radishes
grated carrots
tomatoes
surimi - artificial crab meat
cucumbers
bell peppers

Again, individual taste usually governs the choice of salad garnishes.

Other types of salad

Some salads are based on food items other than fresh vegetables:

History

During the Middle Ages, after eating mostly salted meats and pickled vegetables all winter, people would be "salt-sick" and looked forward to spring greens. Popular history asserts that peasants ate more salads than lords, and were the healthier for it, and in fact salads, cooked and raw, included many ingredients that would be "gourmet" today: lovage, burnet, sorrel.

The diarist John Evelyn wrote a book on salads, Acetaria: A Discourse on Sallets (1699), that describes the new salad greens like "sellery" (celery), coming out of Italy and the Netherlands.

External links

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 *[[Hawaiian salad]]
 *[[Italian salad]]
+**[[Rocket salad]] (rucola)
 **[[Agretti]] salad
 **[[Radicchio]] salad