In today's Glossary salad explains how a dish of finely chopped fresh or cooked vegetables, various meats and fish, and eggs, mushrooms, fruits. In short, cold and crumbling - this is the salad. Originally the word meant exclusively vegetable salad dish, besides the green leaves and garden herbs, which until the 20 th century called salad plants. In international cuisine salads are logged in as a dish of ancient Rome that there were known to two and a half thousand years ago, and they consisted of endive, parsley and onion, seasoned with honey, pepper and salt. For limits Apennine peninsula and above all - to France hit a salad in the early Middle Ages as a gourmet meal, served to roast. The high level of French art, climate, profuse succulent vegetation - it helped to find the salad a second home.

Those French are included in the composition of lettuce - a plant with a neutral taste, consisting of some leaves. The plant was named in honor of salad made from a dish. Then he began to include a salad and other herbs: dandelion, chicory, swans, etc. In the late 18 th century in salads came cabbage, and celery, pepper. And just behind them - fresh cucumbers, asparagus, artichoke plants of the same green color.

At the turn of 18 and 19 centuries in salads start adding non-green plants and roots, is complicated and salad dressing, sauces are introduced, and especially mayonnaise. Beets, potatoes, carrots - all underground vegetables, did not dare to enter into salads raw, they began to boil. That is how a particular subspecies of salad - vinaigrette. A rough, he demanded and new gas stations, capable stifle earthy flavor of carrots irritating gourmets. Then they started to put in vinaigrettes salted and pickled vegetables, and in Germany and Russia - pickled mushrooms, pickled herring.
Two major advantages of lettuce were bribed, and to date: first, the quickness of preparation and lack of heating, and, secondly - the magic word vitamins! Salads and in our time are in demand dish on our table. Diverse in appearance and taste combinations, salads contain so necessary to our body minerals and nutrients, fiber and, of course, vitamins.