Salads, which are sometimes thought only to have been seriously appreciated in recent times and to have owed much of their popularity to America, were in fact longed for by our ancestors through the hard winters of salt meat, bread and sparse roots. The first shoots of a wide variety of herbs, wild and cultivated, were eagerly awaited, and a far wider variety of leaves, roots, buds, flowers and shoots were used than we ever consider today. Indeed, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries