Dine like an Egyptian

Saladman – Why is it the salad days of youth? I didn’t like salad that much when I was younger and considering my taste and budgetary constraints I feel the expression would have been the Taco Bell Value Menu of youth. – Greens

This one has always stumped Saucyman too – Were days of salad a nod to austerity, signifying better morsels will follow? If so, why isn’t the expression the rice and bean days of youth? Were the salad days in question linked to the new growth of springtime, the eternal promise of warmer days and more daylight after a long winter? What if you close your meal with a green salad? Shouldn’t the salad then represent the ability to appreciate the simple pleasures of life, a quality that often accompanies age?

Turns out after years of idle speculation – the best kind – the answer was as close as the bookshelf. The expression Salad Days comes from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, where Cleopatra speaks of “my salad days, when I was green in judgment”.

The use of green to imply a lack of experience came into general usage a few hundred years before Mr. Shakespeare’s time. Not to get all medieval on you, but as early as 1150, green was being used to describe all things that were new and innocent. The word/phrase ‘greenhorn, green-horn, green horne’ is also loosely associated with food production: Originally used to describe soldiers new to the battlefield, these fresh recruits were named after the incipient horn of freshly slaughtered livestock - later the word came mean anyone lacking experience.

Certain varieties of both tomatoes and apples can be green in color and be ready to eat but more often than not when green is used to describe plants (and hopefully not meats), the word denotes the food is not quite ready for harvest - Specifically, fruit that is not yet ripe is referred to as 'green'. More archaically, green refers to plants or meats in an unpreserved – unsalted, unsmoked - condition as in “Dude, that Cod is green” or whatever the 17th Century Basque equivalent of dude is.

Currently, describing a something as green implies the person or product is earth friendly. Green is now the color of ecology, which is more a banner of conservation and preservation than renewal and freshness.

Later this week we have a new word from the kitchen and following up and the recent post about the joys of cast iron, Saucyman will get specific about how to properly season a cast iron or steel pan.