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SALLET

Volume 16 · 220 words · 1797 Edition

or SALLAD, 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 salado; Du-Cange from folgama, which is used in Ausonius 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 salad-herbs, and those which ordinarily make the basis of our English salads, are lettuce, celery, endive, cresses, radish, and rape; along with which, by way of furniture, or additional, are used purslane, spinach, sorrel, tarragon, burnet, corn-sallet, and chervil.

The gardeners call some plants small herbs in salads; these should always be cut while in the seed-leaf; as cresses, mustard, radish, turnip, 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 glasshouses 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 be used recovers them.