Salade

I love salads. When I’m in the states, I tend to eat a lot of them, sometimes every day, which really, is not such a bad habit to have, even if it may seem a tad obsessive. Left to my own devices, I tend to put bits of every vegetable in the fridge right into the salad along with whatever leafy accompaniment I have on hand, usually baby spinach leaves. Then I debate over which salad dressing I’m in the mood for and what I actually have on hand. Some fresh ground pepper and I’m happy as a clam.
Now, the French do eat salads, and quite often a meal is begun with a salad course before moving on to the main dish. Yet their idea of what entails a salad is slightly different from my own heavy handed approach. For the most part, simplicity seems to rule. A salad could be just “salade” (i.e. lettuce which shares the name) or just beets, or just shredded carrots. Usually this has a bit of a quick vinaigrette mixed in, just some balsamic and olive oil. My French mom once went wild with a salad; she put in tomatoes and along with it some bits of cheese, plus the prerequisite vinaigrette.
I tend to get rather excited over the word salad even if its just one vegetable since sometimes that is the only vegetable I will see all day. I do not count potatoes as vegetables. Though I must admit, I was given a slightly skewed first impression of my host family’s eating habits when I first moved in. They wanted to make me feel special and really show me some very “French” meals, so lunches and dinners were heavily weighted towards meats and seafood. Now they have realized that they can put anything in front of me and I’ll eat it and it doesn’t have to be special or stereotypically French. Thus my introduction to cèpes and a couple other vegetable centered meals such as last night’s chou-fleur (cauliflower) and the previous night’s artichokes which gloriously littered our plates with tooth-scraped leaves.
Salads in restaurants have a tendency to be a bit more complicated, though not by much. There is the classic goat cheese salad. This involves taking a green salad, romaine lettuce, adding maybe some walnuts and grated carottes and then on the side including two triangles of toast with a warm round of goat cheese sitting on top. This is quite tasty and I’m really developing a liking for goat cheese. Another salad I had in a restaurant was what they called “une salade gourmande.” This included some very nice salad greens and sliced tomatoes along with seemingly every type of charcuterie known to mankind piled on top completely hiding the “salad” part of the salad. Though it certainly ranks as one of the meatiest salads I’ve ever had or, really, ever seen, it was pretty good. And it gave me a chance to try foie gras on the sly since it was included on a bit of toast in the same manner as the goat cheese.
But the most puzzling salads that I’ve found are those that are quite short on vegetables in general. Often they will take blé (wheat) or rice or couscous, mix in a few finely diced onions, carrots and maybe a few other things so tiny as to be unrecognizable, and pass it off as a salad. I am well aware that we have veggie-less salads in the states, for example fruit salad, pasta salad and jello salad (which completely baffle me, but that is a whole different subject), but the fact that you have to be very careful to read the ingredients of a salad before ordering to make sure there is salad involved takes some getting used to. I actually quite like the blé salads, they can be refreshing.
I looked up the definition of “salade” in Le Petit Larousse, a French dictionary which is not at all “petit” and after defining it as what we know as lettuce it listed this:

“Plat composé de feuilles de ces plantes, crues et assaisonnées. ”
Which roughly means: a dish composed of leaves of this plant (lettuce), raw and seasoned.

An interesting definition since salads very often do not contain lettuce at all, and with the rice and blé salads, they often need to be cooked first, even if they are served cold.
I also checked Word’s definition of salad and was met with several responses:

1. a cold dish consisting mainly of a mixture of raw vegetables, whole, sliced, chopped, or in pieces, usually served with a dressing for flavor. Many other ingredients may be incorporated into a salad, which can be served as a separate course or as an accompaniment to other food.
2. a cold dish consisting of a particular type of food such as a single vegetable or a selection of fruit, cut into pieces or slices, and served usually with a dressing
3. any leafy vegetable commonly used to make a green salad, typically the many types of lettuce, watercress, chicory, and endive
4. a confused or varied mixture

So I suppose maybe I am too strict with my idea of salads. As with everything else here, I am truly broadening my horizons. Though, still, I was inordinately excited when I ordered “une salade végétarienne” and received a plate twice the size of my head piled high with practically every vegetable that is in season here right now. Sometimes habits are hard to break.