Salad

Salad may be mixture of salad green or may be made up of raw, cooked or canned fruits,vegetables, meat or poultry or fish. On some occasions, nuts, cheese, eggs maybe used as principal ingredients.

Raw salad may be made from cabbage, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, onions, cucmbers, carrots and cauliflowers. We can use any number of combinations for salads so long as they are attractive in color and palatable in flavour.

Tomatoes are a good salad ingredients and are available almost any time of the year. Cucumbers with their crisps texture are highly valued in salads.

A creative cook has unlimited options of salad combination. When making a salad, it is suggested that:

• All salad ingredients should be handled carefully to preserve the natural color and shape of the vegetables.
• They should be cute into bite size.
• The salad dressing should be added just before it is seved to obtain the best result.
• All moisture clinging to the surface of salad ingredients should be removed to enable the salad dressing to cling to their surface.

Truly, a salad is a very nutritious dish especially when made of fresh green vegetables with its abundant supply of vitamins and minerals which help prevent the body from diseases and regulate body process.

They are so simple to make. All you have to do is wash the green vegetables and mix with your favourite dressing.

So simple even a poet could do it......I would like to share with you a poem written in 1839 by poet Sidney Smith.

In a letter to Lady Holland in 1839, Smith gives the recipe for this salad. It follows the poem except that at the close Smith instructs her, "Mix the Salad thoroughly just before it is used" (The Letters of Sydney Smith, Vol. II, ed. Nowell C. Smith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953]: 684).

To make this condiment, your poet begs

The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;

Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,

Smoothness and softness to the salad give.

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,

And, half suspected, animate the whole.

Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,

Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;

But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,

To add a double quantity of salt.

Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca brown,

And twice with vinegar procured from town;

And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss

A magic soupcion of anchovy sauce.

O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!

'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:

Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,

And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!

Serenely full, the epicure would say,

"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."

Sydney Smith. (1771-1845)