More Salad

My daughter’s first sentence was “I want more salad.” This begs the question of the actual contents of the salad since every country has a different default definition for a salad. In other words, certain ingredients are used unless specified otherwise.  That choice is dictated by the land and history of the region to a certain degree.

In Israel, salad generally implies some mixture of tomatoes and cucumbers.  Not native to the region, the warm weather and advanced agricultural techniques guarantees a yearlong supply of them.  The actual proportion depends on the relative price of those two components; a heavy proportion of cucumbers hints that tomato prices are high at the moment. Personal choice affects the choice of any additional ingredients, such as peppers and onions, and dressing. With the internationalization of food, some restaurants call this “chopped salad.”  So generally you won’t get lettuce unless it is specified in the description.

By contrast, an American salad is generally lettuce, most often iceberg, with a few token tomatoes. To be fair, lettuce in the United States is generally inexpensive and of good quality.  For the eater, the typical dinner salad does present good volume, giving the impression of value for the money.  Impressions can be much important than reality.  I have to admit that I strongly prefer my “adopted” salad over that of my birthplace mainly because of taste.

The French, strangely enough, have no particular salad but instead local specialties.  In small cafés, les crudités (a plate of raw vegetables, not foul language) is often served. Nicer restaurants may offer slices of tomatoes with mozzarella cheese.  In the south of France, a salade Niçoise, containing lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, green beans and tuna, is available everywhere.  As is the French tendency, why make it simple if you can make more it fancy (and complicated)? 

In northern Europe, due to the cold weather, cabbage is much more economical than lettuce.  There are countless cabbage dishes, coleslaw for example, served with meals.  Besides being hardier than lettuce, cabbage has much more taste, albeit a bit bitter.  The use of various dressings, such as mayonnaise and vinegar-based pickling, adds a variety to the cabbage experience.

In Asia, the norm is pickled salads.  China, Japan and Korea all suffer from a lack of agricultural land relative to their population.  Also, China traditionally used “night soil” (human waste) as a fertilizer.  Thus, vegetables are generally good but expensive relative to income.  I have heard the Japanese market prices are quite “wild” from a Western perspective.  So, the salads come in small pickled dishes with choice vegetables.  Examples include Korean kimshee, Japanese pickled daikon and Chinese pickled vegetables.  These are smaller but much tastier than their Western equivalents.

So, a salad is what the land gives to the people in plenty.  I would like to hear about your local salad.

Food conclusions

Translations without cultural explanation can be deceiving even for the casual tourist.  While food items may seem simple to guess or find in the most basic pocket dictionary, naïve readers may be unaware of what they will be getting.

For example, most cultures have meat as an essential part of any serious meal.  However, the term meat left unspecified has a clear significant for the locals that may not be known to visitors, mainly based on the most economic and prevalent form of it.  For example, in countries with significant quantities of land water, beef is the common main course of a dinner.  By contrast, if the media inn Israel talks about families that cannot afford meat during the week, it is referring to chicken, which is affordable to most families, as compared to beef products, which are expensive and not especially good (granted with a few exceptions).  New Zealanders, outnumbered by their sheep, do their best to reduce the quantity of the latter.  The Chinese, often living in cramped conditions or poor land (a high percentage of China is actually mountain or desert), assume that pork is on the menu.  Some countries, such as France, are blessed with a rich variety and quality of land. For them, meat is meat, i.e. derived from an animal source and needing to be specified. 

In the same vein, it is common to eat a salad with that meat but it is not always clear to visitors what they will get.  In the United States, lettuce with a few tomatoes is the standard fare.  In the Middle East, lettuce is exotic but finely diced tomatoes, cucumbers and parsley are served everywhere.  Europe tends to have sliced vegetables, including the basic crudités in France, which means the raw variety. South Korea is famous for Kim Chee, a fermented cabbage based dish. For that matter, steamed or pickled cabbage is the basic green in China (historically because the use of “night soil”, i.e. human feces, rendered eating raw vegetables quite dangerous).

We need our daily bread, or so it is said, but the form of that bread can vary from country to country.  The United States generally services some kind of white flour roll unless you are sitting in an upscale or foreign restaurant.  The baguette rules in Italy and France, curiously enough even in Chinese restaurants.  By contrast, good brown bread is available in Germany and Holland, but has to be ordered in the former.  Local Middle Eastern food, especially humus, is automatically accompanied by pitta, a pocket bread, except during Pesach where even Arab restaurants have matzo, unleavened bread, available for their somewhat observant diners. India is famous for na’an and other flatbread.

Finally, locals tend to drink different beverages.  The French love their wine with any meal, claiming with some possible justification that it leads to better health and sex.  The Chinese are famous for their tea.  In Eastern Europe including Germany, beer is inexpensive and good though I am not quite so confident of its positive effect on life expectancy and intimacy.  Americans, being the land of plenty, drink everything, including milk. Once soft drinks were once the norm in Israel, but the Russian immigration has brought with it greater consumption of alcohol of all kinds, for better or worse.

A Feast Culture

Feasting or festive eating with friends if you so prefer is a universal human pleasure.  People enjoy communal meals throughout the world, no matter how rich or poor the country, family, or land is. Of course, the food on the menu is clearly localized, generally including native and highly-valued delicacies. A more subtle difference between feasts is their styles.

For example, an American feast, such as Thanksgiving, is primarily judged on the size of the food: the bigger, the better.  People brag about the weight of the Turkey, the number of pans of sweet potatoes, and the diameter of the apple pies.  Of course, the settings, including the plates, knife, fork, spoons, and napkins, should be as festive as possible, ideally with some Thanksgiving motif.  People sit properly in their chairs and stuff their face elegantly so to speak.  (I would add that they watch the Detroit Lions lose a football game, but that is not necessarily true now).

A French feast is a different scene entirely.  Not only are the settings fancy, but the food is measured by its fanciness and creativeness, defined as putting together foods and tastes that I never thought would go together.  What is lacking in quantity is easily made up in esthetics and time.  Enjoying food involves all of the senses, taking one’s time to appreciate each culinary work of art.  Of course, wine provides the transition from hors d’oeuvre to soup to main dish to salad to bread and cheese to desert to coffee.  The ideal meal is signaled by the fact that the diner cannot decide what the piece de resistance of the occasion was.  Also, curiously, although the meal took over two hours and involved a respectable amount of food, the diner is neither hungry nor stuffed, but instead just right. (Somehow, on the way home, the guests discuss at which restaurant they will eat the next day.)

Israeli feasts, being Israeli, reflect the ethnic background of the host.  Yekke (German) and mainland French families will be more formal while Sephardic families tend to be more relaxed.  The key is the variety of foods.  An example of this is the issue of salads.  Israeli weddings and picnics are measured by the number of salads to choose from.  The term “too much” is mentioned but not meant seriously:  there is no such thing as too many salads.  Anything that goes with Pita bread is fine.  Pickled, garlicky, salty, hot and sweet, red, green, white and yellow, variety is the spice of life.  Of course, the salads, a meal in themselves, are followed by barbeque, preferably steak.  It would appear eating chicken is a sign of poverty.  In house parties, the emphasis is on the variety of main dishes: meat, chicken, and fish (for those fish lovers out there).  Cakes of all kinds are the preferred dessert as compared to pies.

So, there are numerous manners of overeating.  Feel free to share any local feast customs.