Salads and Salad Dressings

Ancient Greeks picked lettuce (Lactuca sativa) in its spindly, wild state and consumed it both raw and in cooked forms. The plant was popularized by the Romans, and many European languages have names that derive from the Latin word for lettuce. The Romans enjoyed a variety of dishes with raw vegetables similar to present-day salad ingredients, such as lettuce, endive, and cucumbers. Roman salad dressing was initially salt (sal) or brine—hence the derivation of the word “salad”—and a combination of olive oil and vinegar. The first-century CE Roman cook Marcus Apicius gives a recipe for a salad containing ginger, rue, dates, pepper, honey, cumin, and vinegar.