Welcome to Wentyworld.com continuing coverage of Salad Week!
Here is the official video diary of Salad Week, Day 1 with special guest cameo by Kathy Worley!
Now that you’ve seen which salads Herr Kroheim and I nibbled on today, here is a history of the salad that is completely fraudulent.
“Salad” is a term derived from the Latin sal. Actually, it was an Italian chef named Sal who spoke Latin, as many of them did at the time. One evening Sal was having 11 people over for dinner. “Ut EGO sum iens ut custodiant omnes isti homines ex omnibus angustiis meis comedere cibum?”, he cried in frustration.
Oh…I suppose you’re gonna need that translated from the Latin.
“How am I gonna keep all these people from eating me out of house and home?” he cried in frustration.
His wife Gabriella threw open the refrigerator….sorry, this is from older times. She threw open the icebox and found a head of lettuce. “Sal, snap out of it!” she Chered. “I’ll chop up this lettuce, put some vinegar on it, maybe some little cherry tomatoes, ooh! Shredded carrots…maybe some hard-boiled eggs for some reason…”
“This is getting out of hand already,” Sal protested. “Just chop up the lettuce.”
That night, as friends, relatives, a random kid from the house next door and the family dog Luciano Barkarotti sat down for dinner they enjoyed the very first salad. And everyone shared pics of their bowls of lettuce and vinegar on social media. Which back then meant posing for 18 hours for daguerreotypes, which were then carted from village to village on a chariot. (Little known fact! The classic “chariot race” sequence from Ben-Hur depicts a furious quest to be the first to share a photo of a baby holding a bottle of wine. #thesekidsofmine #manicmonday)
Tomorrow: More salad! More tomfoolery! As Salad Week continues!