Happy Thanksgiving, US-ians!
No misogyny today, just videos of cute kitties eating and falling asleep. I am going to spend the day eating and playing with kitties and finishing up season one of Doomsday Preppers. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by people with delusional beliefs, but I am. And I guess most of you reading this are as well, huh?
Now the videos:
This one doesn’t involve eating or sleeping but, come on, it’s adorable!
I think it’s basically a salad in the sense of “mixture of stuff that isn’t subsequently cooked.” Think potato salad, pasta salad, etc.
When I was a kid in Saudi a lot of people used the word salad to refer to salad greens rather than the finished dish, so seeing something with no veggies described as a “salad” sometimes really throws me off, because it sounds like they’re using “salad” to refer to a dish with no salad in it. Like if someone said they were going to have “pasta” and then described something that had sauce, sausage, etc but no actual pasta in it.
I’m with CassandraSays on this one, ‘salad’ has to have, well, salad-y bits in it. Frankly I’ve always been deeply suspicious of Waldorf salad, and that actually does contain salad. But I’ll try and remember what Americans mean by it in future!
Found a whole article about Jell-O salads! Turns out they’re not a strictly regional delight, but instead were a creation of industrial food makers back in the 1950’s. Their popularity seems to still be higher in certain parts of the country, though. Utah, Ohio, and Iowa were all mentioned.
So not distinctly Southern after all. I sit corrected!
Still don’t know exactly why they get to be “salads,” though. I think katz’s explanation is probably the best.
@ nat
Part of my brain goes all Monty Python, you know?
“Why is there no salad in this salad? How can you call it a salad if there’s no salad in it?”
That article is seriously breaking my brain Fitzy.
Jelly is sweet, and to be eaten with ice-cream.
Salads are made of lettuce and other watery raw vegetables.
I just can’t even begin to imagine what Jell-O salads are supposed to taste like. But I suppose the same goes for a lot of American foods. I have bought a cookbook from a vegan restaurant in New York though, so there’s some things I’ve been thinking of trying, especially when I get my hands on some vital wheat gluten.
@Fitzy: It’s not vegetarian-friendly either since it’s made of dead animals, not just animal products.
@ nat
Word of warning – a lot of people have a nasty reaction to wheat gluten in that form. I don’t think I have any sort of gluten allergy, at least in the sense that I’m fine with both bread and pasta, but gluten in the form you’re referring to makes me feel very ill. Every time I’ve tried to eat it I’ve felt awful for days afterwards – it seems to be hard for a lot of people to digest for some reason.
OK. I think I’ve got it.
When you say ‘salad’, you mean ‘terrine’. Right? Sort of?
@Cassandra
I’ve eaten it before, but it’s quite expensive to buy the pre-prepared stuff (seitan) so I’m going to make my own, but I have to remember to order the VWG first, I’ve had the book three damn months and keep forgetting. Oh oh also I GOT A NEW OVEN AND HOB today, the landlord actually did his damn job. They’re all silver and shiny 😀
Woo, enjoy your new appliances!
It was really weird actually Katz. The guy who fitted it is one of my next door neighbours – who I’ve never met before but once nearly called the cops on once over summer because there was so much screaming coming from his flat I thought someone was being killed. Until I heard this voice of pure, gutteral rage growling (with an Essex twang) “DANNY BOYLE, YOU FAHCKING UNPATRIOTIC CAHNT!!!” – it turns out he really didn’t like the part of the Olympic opening ceremony with the Queen lookalike. He’s so patriotic he has ‘God Save The Queen’ as his mobile ringtone and… well, we call our flat the anarcho-bunker and hung black and red bunting outside it during the Jubilee because we were so sick of Union Jacks everywhere, and the bunting’s still up because we went into a war of attrition with the local council and decided not to remove our bunting until they removed all theirs. We won and now we’re gloating.
So my oven might be rigged to blow up.
I use the term salad the way katz described, as meaning a cold side dish for a meal. If we’re talking about a salad that has lettuce, vegetables, and dressing, then that is a side salad. You can call it a salad, too, but side salad is more specific.
I wouldn’t call Watergate salad a Jello salad, though. It has pistachio pudding mix and Cool Whip, but no Jello, and it’s not made in a mold. If I had to classify it, I’d say it’s a dessert salad.
But then what do you call a salad made with lettuce, veggies, dressing, etc, that’s intended to be eaten as an entree?
An entree salad?
I don’t get how “side salad” tells you anything about the ingredients, all it tells you is that it’s a relatively small portion and not intended to be the bulk of the meal.
I had to google “terrine,” and the results look nothing like any Jello salad/fruit salad/etc. I’ve ever seen (it appears to be something like a meatloaf?) soooo…not really?
I think it may be more accurate to say that when you say “salad,” you mean “green salad,” and when we say “salad,” we mean “some kind of mixture of a bunch of ingredients that you serve cold, generally as a side dish, which includes but is not limited to green salads.” So there’s green salad, but also pasta salad, fruit salad, three-bean salad, potato salad, and Jell-O salad.
(Also, I just ate Watergate salad yesterday, but until a few minutes ago, I had no idea that’s what it was called – in my family it’s “that green stuff.” :-p )
If it’s a big salad of lettuce, veggies, and dressing, then it’s a dinner salad. If you put ham or turkey on it, then it’s a chef salad. If you put chicken on it, then it’s a chicken salad. This is confusing, though, because chicken salad can also mean a mixture of chicken and mayo to put on a sandwich.
Or you can also just call it a big salad, like Elaine from Seinfeld.
Terrines are like quite roughly chopped meat and vegetables which are in a firm shape, so you can slice them evenly and sometimes held together with aspic, and eaten cold.
But I take your point in the next paragraph, I do mean green salad unless otherwise specified.
Actually it occurs to me that to me “salad” implies “dressing”. So if someone calls a cold pasta dish with a vinegar and oil based dressing a salad that doesn’t seem too strange to me, but anything involving gelatin does.
It’s interesting how we mentally classify this stuff. Going by the looser definition (mixture of chopped up things that isn’t cooked and is served cold), isn’t salsa a salad? But most people wouldn’t think of it as one.
If “salad” is left unmodified, we tend to assume it means “salad made of lettuce, veggies, and dressing.” In order to get another type of salad, you have to specify “potato salad” or “pasta salad” or whatever.
Okay, then that’s like a Jell-O salad only insofar as some (but not all) Jell-O salads are also made in a mold. Further googling shows me a terrine that does look kind of like a very fancy Jell-O salad: http://diethood.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/terrine-3.jpg Most Jell-O salads look more like these, though: http://www.simplyrecipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2004/09/grandmas_jello_salad2.jpg http://whenelephantsfly.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/how-to-make-a-delicious-jello-fruit-salad.jpg
It is actually fascinating hearing how everyone else uses the term “salad.”
<blockquoteIt’s interesting how we mentally classify this stuff. Going by the looser definition (mixture of chopped up things that isn’t cooked and is served cold), isn’t salsa a salad? But most people wouldn’t think of it as one.
I’d say the important distinction is that you don’t normally just eat salsa by the spoonful. Salads are dishes in their own right.
(This is actually really entertaining to me, trying to figure out under what definition things I’ve always called “salads” are salads. :-p )
Dammit, blockquotes. Sigh.