The salad eaters

Just think of all the health-conscious businessmen who order sensible lunches of salad and iced tea. Think of all the women who lunch on salad and then dine on salad in the evening. We throw a sack of salad greens in the picnic basket almost the way we throw in potato chips.

Think about California cuisine. "The first time I went to Spago," recalls restaurateur Fred Eric, "I was struck by the way everything came with salad. Beside it, on it, under it."

The salad -- from the wild creations of high-flown restaurants to all the low-flying variations tossed in a bowl at home -- might be our most pervasive culinary contribution to the world. And the creativity hasn't stopped, in part thanks to the spectacular influences from everywhere else, especially Asia.

But to understand the contemporary salad and what exactly California has accomplished, you have to go way back. In the beginning, we ate a lot of salad around here simply because we, unlike people in many other places, had fresh vegetables all year round. We were salad eaters 120 years ago because we could afford to be.

Back in those days, moving across the country was a major step that meant you might never see your family again, so newcomers tended to take to Los Angeles with the passion of converts. Local patriotism inspired countless salads using local ingredients such as citrus fruits, walnuts, avocados and olives. The first recipe for Waldorf salad was published in New York in 1896, and within 10 years we were cranking it up here with chopped oranges.

Our warm climate also has given us a natural taste for cold foods. We have this in common with the South, of course, and Southern immigrants brought in a taste for fruit salads we have never lost.

One last consequence of our fabled climate was a casual, outdoorsy style of life. Instead of formal dining, we went for the great outdoors, sunbathing, the open road. In 1905, when there was only one car to every 65 people in town, somebody already had titled a recipe "automobile salad." It was just lettuce, celery, pickled olives and quartered tomatoes tossed with boiled dressing, but the name bespoke an eager, go-anywhere way of life.

Battle Creek, west

The last element was the diet reform movement, which had been gathering steam since the Civil War. In its original capital of Battle Creek, Mich. (in the grain-growing Midwest; coincidence?), John Harvey Kellogg had exalted cereals as the fount of health. When the health food idea came to California, though, the emphasis immediately shifted to the idea of eating vegetables, preferably raw, and it caught on in a big way here. Hollywood, in particular, proved highly susceptible to salad mania.

By the 1920s, the Southland was the world capital of exotic diets. You didn't even have to be a diet crank to catch salad fever. My mother believed firmly in the goodness of salad and drummed into me the idea that you should have salad at least once a day.

Years later, still eating my salad a day, I learned the hard way that raw foods aren't always the key to health -- at least where sanitation standards are dubious. When I got home after a year in the Middle East, my doctor told me I had picked up eight intestinal parasites.

"You're a menagerie," he said, with a disagreeable laugh.

Like any other food, salad has its fashions. At the turn of the century, mayonnaise was more popular than oil and vinegar dressing, and dairy-based boiled dressings outpolled both put together. There were countless boiled dressing recipes, but a typical one would be cream boiled with mustard and vinegar and a thickener such as eggs, perhaps enriched with some oil or butter.

Why boiled dressing? It suited the inherited northern European taste for cream sauces and custards. As Annabella Hill wrote in "Mrs. Hill's Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book" (1870), "There is a prejudice with many against the use of olive oil." Olives were proverbially an acquired taste in this country, and olive oil may have seemed alien to the table (it was associated with medicinal uses).

On top of that, a lot of imported oil was probably pretty old by the time it reached the customer. That was less of a problem here, because olive oil was a local product. Early in the century, the northern tip of the San Fernando Valley was so thickly planted with olive trees that it was given the quasi-Latin name Sylmar, meaning the sea (maris) of trees (sylvae).

Turn-of-the-century salad makers also were in love with stuffing things (tomatoes mostly) and assembling them in cutesy shapes (cutting up hard-boiled eggs to resemble water lilies).

Celery and gelatin still had the aura of luxury foods. In the 1920s and 1930s, the cult of aspics and gelatin salads would reach a screaming peak.