SALLET, or SALAD, a dish of eatable herbs, ordinarily accompanying roast meat; composed chiefly of crude fresh herbage, seasoned with salt, oil, and vinegar.
Menage derives the word from the Latin salata; of sal, "salt;" others from salcedo; Du-Cange from sal-gama, which is used in Aulus Gellius and Columella in the same sense.
Some add mustard, hard eggs, and sugar; others, pepper, and other spices, with orange-peel, saffron, &c.
The principal fallet-herbs, and those which ordinarily make the basis of our English fallets, are lettuce, celery, endive, cress, radish, and rape; along with which, by way of furniture, or additionals, are used purslane, spinach, sorrel, tarragon, burnet, corn-fallet, and chervil.
The gardeners call some plants small herbs in fallets; these should always be cut while in the seed-leaf: as cress, mustard, radish, turnep, spinach, and lettuce; all which are raised from seeds sown in drills, or lines, from the middle of February to the end of March, under glasses or frames; and thence to the middle of May, upon natural beds, warmly exposed; and during the summer heats in more shady places; and afterwards in September, as in March, &c.; and lastly, in the rigour of the winter, in hot-beds. If they chance to be frozen in very frosty weather, putting them in spring-water two hours before they are used recovers them.