7 October 2021
A recipe for salad set down by the chief cook for King Richard II of England, c.1390. The recipe, transcribed below, follows the rubricated word Salat.
Salads actually take their name from the dressing, not the primary components. Salad comes from the Old French salade, whose root is from the Latin sal, or salt—the name is from the seasonings applied to the primary ingredients.
Salad makes its English debut toward the end of the fourteenth century. The oldest known recipe for a salad is one used by c.1390 by the master cook of Richard II of England, found in a collection of medieval recipes with the title The Forme of Cury. The manuscript in which it’s found dates to c.1425:
Salat.
Take persel, sawge, garlec, chibolles, onyouns, leek, borage, myntes, porrettes, fenel and toun cressis, rew, rosemarye, purslarye, laue, and waische hem clene, pike hem, pluk hem small wiþ þyn honde and myng hem well with rawe oile. Lay on vyneger and salt. And serue it forth.(Salad. Take parsley, sage, garlic, scallions, onions, leek, borage mints, young leeks, fennel, and garden cresses, rue, rosemary, pusrlane, lave and wash them clean, pick them, pluck them into small pieces with your hand, and mix them well with raw oil. Lay on vinegar and salt. And serve it forth.)
The phrase salad days is a play on the metaphor of green symbolizing young plant growth, and the phrase originally meant youth and naivete. The origin of this one is quite straightforward. It’s from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene 5, in which Cleopatra chalks up her past statements of love for Julius Caesar as indiscretions of her youth, or salad days:
Alex. I, Madam, twenty seuerall Messengers.
Why do you send so thicke?Cleo. Who’s borne that day, when I forget to send to Anthonie, shall dye a begger. Inke and paper Charmian. Welcome my good Alexas. Did I Charmian, euer loue Cæsar so?
Char. O that braue Cæsar!
Cleo. Be choak’d with such another Emphasis,
Say the braue Anthony.Char. The valiant Cæsar.
Cleo. By Isis, I will giue thee bloody teeth,
If thou with Cæsar Parago nagaine [sic]:
My man of men.Char. By your most gracious pardon,
I sing but after you.Cleo. My sallad dayes,
When I was greene in iudgment, cold in blood,
To say, as I saide then. But come, away,
Get me Inke and Paper,
he shall haue euery day a seuerall greeting, or Ile vnpeople Egypt.
Parago nagaine is a printing error in the First Folio. The line should read Paragon againe.
But in recent decades, the phrase has shifted in meaning, referring instead to a period when a person was in their prime, at the peak of their abilities. For instance, the following headline appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 2 March 1970 over an article about how recruitment for the US Army Reserve was past its peak:
Salad Days Over for Army’s Reserve
Draft Lottery, Manpower Cuts Shrink Waiting Lists
Salad days being over, we’ve all been there.
Sources:
The Forme of Cury. London: J. Nichols, 1780, 41–42. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Add. MS 5016, fol. 6r.
Freeman, Jan. “Salad Says Aren’t What They Used to Be.” Boston Globe, 15 April 2001, third edition, D5. ProQuest.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. salade, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. salad, n.
Rawitch, Robert. “Salad Days Over for Army’s Reserve.” Los Angeles Times, 2 March 1970, B1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, 1.5. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (First Folio, Brandeis University). London: Isaac Jaggrd and Edward Blount, 1623, 344–45.
Image credit: London, British Library, Add. MS 5016, fol. 6r. Public domain image as a brief section of a mechanical reproduction of a work in the public domain.