Medieval Salad: The Salat of 1390 and the Trouble with Raw Greens

The Salat of about 1390

The Forme of Cury is a roll of 196 recipes compiled about 1390 by the chief master cooks of King Richard II. Its opening lines say the work was put together with the advice of the masters of physic and philosophy who lived at court, so the king's doctors had a say in the king's dinner.

Among stews, sauces and fritters sits a short recipe headed Salat. The cook is to take parsley, sage, garlic, chibolles, onions, leek, borage, mints, porrectes, fennel, cresses, rue, rosemary and purslane, wash them clean, pick them over, pluck them small by hand, mix them well with raw oil, then lay on vinegar and salt and serve.

Samuel Pegge, whose printed edition of the roll is dated 1780, glossed chibolles as young onions and linked porrectes to the French word porrette. He also counted the ingredients, remarking that the salad had no fewer than fourteen where the cooks of his own day would have been content with two or three.

A bowl of herbs, not lettuce

Read as a shopping list, the Salat is not what most people now picture. There is no lettuce in it. Close to a third of the bowl is the onion family: garlic, young onions, onions and leeks. The rest is strongly flavored leaves, some of them, such as sage, rosemary and rue, used today in pinches, not handfuls.

The method, though, is familiar. The leaves are washed, torn instead of chopped, and dressed with oil, vinegar and salt at the last moment. Food historian Andrew F. Smith traces the word salad itself to a Latin phrase for salted herbs, and writes that by the late 14th century an English salad was usually a plate of leafy vegetables served beside cooked meat or poultry.

Worts for the pot

The Salat stands out because nearly every other green in the period cookery books is cooked. The usual word for them was worts, from an Old English word for a herb or plant. A recipe in The Forme of Cury takes borage, colewort, parsley, beets, orach, violet leaves, savory and fennel, boils them, presses them small and simmers them again in good broth.

A cookery book of about 1430 to 1440, known as Harleian MS. 279, opens with long worts boiled with beef and marrow bones, thickened with grated white bread and colored with saffron. The recipes that follow treat cabbages and mixed herbs in much the same way. Greens, in other words, were pottage ingredients first and salad ingredients only now and then.

Why raw greens made people nervous

Medieval medicine explained the body through four humors, blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm, each a pairing of the qualities hot, cold, dry and moist. Foods were sorted the same way, and a good diet kept the qualities in balance. The Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis notes that lettuce, cucumbers and spinach were classed as cold and wet, while herbs were thought warm and dry and so able to balance them.

Smith makes the same point about salad in particular. Many medical writers disapproved of raw fruit and uncooked vegetables because both counted as cold, and salads were seasoned with salt and oil, which counted as hot, to counteract that coldness. Seen in that light, a bowl built from pungent herbs and alliums and dressed with oil and salt looks like a careful dish. That is a modern reading, though: the recipe itself gives no reasons.

The caution reached the dining hall. John Russell, who served as usher and marshal to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, wrote a manual for household servants around the middle of the 15th century. Put into modern spelling, one couplet runs: beware of salads, green meats and fruits raw, for they make many a man have a feeble maw. The Boke of Keruynge, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1513, repeats the advice, warning that green salads and raw fruits will make a lord sick.

First course or last?

Opinion was not all on one side. According to Smith, the ancient physicians Hippocrates and Galen held that raw vegetables passed through the body easily, so salad should be eaten first. Others argued that the vinegar in the dressing spoiled the taste of wine, so salad belonged at the end. He adds that after the fall of Rome salads became less important in western Europe, though raw vegetables and fruit were still eaten on fast days and as medicinal correctives.

The Forme of Cury does not say when its Salat was served. It simply ends, as most of its recipes do, with the instruction to serve it forth.

Salad in 1420 and now

For the England of 1420, then, a salad was a real dish with a written recipe a generation old, though it was sharper and more herbal than a modern one, and physicians viewed it with some suspicion. The fresh garden salad served at the St. Nicholas Day Feast at Yuletide Medieval Festival is a modern salad, and makes no claim to be anything else. The idea behind it, fresh leaves dressed with oil and vinegar before the roast, would have been recognized in Richard II's kitchen.

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