Salad Architecture

When I turned to my American Woman's Cook Book (1945) for a recipe for the Pear and Grape Salad found on my dinner menu for Saturday evening, I was kind of excited to realize that it wasn't a molded gelatin salad (more about that in another post). Well, I kept leafing through the Salads section and laughed out loud at some of the recipes. The food prepared for other courses may sometimes have been kind of bland, but the salads - the salads are completely different!

It's as if 1940s housewives reserved all their creative cookery for this single dish... They put such imagination and artistry into their salads. What we've known - at least while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s - as the typical dinner salad (iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, and radishes) had not yet been standardized. The road was still wide open and women came up with some incredibly creative - and sometimes bizarre - combinations for the salad bowl. Fruit was still considered just as suitable for salads as were vegetables. Sometimes a cold cooked vegetable was added, sometimes the salad was molded with gelatin. Salads were often served on a bed of greens or sometimes in a tomato with the insides scooped out (or some other kind of edible "cup"). They were also served on plates instead of bowls.

Salads were always assembled with an eye towards geometry. The esthetic we embrace when it comes to salads today is kind of raggedy and rustic. Sixty years ago, it was all about architecture. The Washington Salad recipe in my cookbook takes this quite literally, instructing the reader to fashion a little log cabin out of "cheese straws" and fill it with a mixture of celery, artichoke hearts, cherries, and grapefruit pulp - topped it with mayonnaise. Tasty? I have no idea, but you gotta give the author points for creativity.

The only rule of thumb seems to be that a salad be served cold - usually with a hearty scoop of mayonnaise! They didn't seem particularly interested, though, in adding croutons, nuts, or cheese - the fatty goodies we like to add - to their salads.

My impression is that this changed over the course of the '40s. The imaginative salads were starting to give way in the later part of the decade to your typical dinner salad. By the '50s, fruit was usually relegated to the dessert course and prepared salad dressings were taking the place of mayonnaise. I think we're coming full circle, though. Our early 21st-century salads are becoming more creative again.



Why do you suppose salads became less imaginative in postwar America?