When my friend’s husband said that he was sick and tired of eating “salad,” she was kind of surprised, because she had thought that, if anything, their dinners had recently had more variety than usual. That was true of the ingredients, she realized, but not of the dishes. Caesar salad, Waldorf salad, Chef Salad, Salad Nicoise, Cobb salad, and Caprese salad (fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and basil) had all been on the menu in the prior two weeks. It seemed to her that it wasn’t that he was actually tired of the food, but more that he was tired of the word “salad.”

This post is a call to the chefs of America: Create dishes for us. Name them, and drop the word “salad.” Of course it’s a salad. According to the dictionary, salad is a mixture of vegetables or fruits, often with a sauce or dressing, sometimes with meat, fish, pasta or cheese, served as an appetizer, side, or main dish. Well that about covers it.

Any combination of greens, vegetables, meats, fish, or fruit makes a salad and then some. Here’s what I mean. There’s pasta salad, rice salad, macaroni salad, potato salad; spinach salad; Greek salad; Israeli salad; eggplant salad; cabbage salad, parsley salad, green salad, tomato salad, cucumber salad, roasted beet salad; fruit salad; egg salad; tuna salad, whitefish salad, crab salad, salmon salad; chicken salad, turkey salad; ham salad; three-bean salad, chickpea salad, and Michigan salad (greens with dried cherries, blue cheese, and vinaigrette), to name just a few.

Enough! Give us fatoush, antipasto, cole slaw, baba ganoush, tabouli, and panzanella instead. Blaze a trail for arugula, sauteed mushrooms, crumbled hard-boiled egg, and diced red onion! Give this dish a name! Don’t call it arugula-mushroom-onion-hard-boiled-egg salad. Call it, I don’t know, Symon Sez. Or Downtown. Just don’t call it salad. 

How about red bell pepper slices, a bit of watercress (or romaine), and thin peels of carrot tossed lightly in olive oil and a sprinkle of salt? This one I might call Fire. (Doug Katz, can you hear me!!?!!)

I’m thinking about the ingredients, all the different kinds of lettuces at the market, the nuts and seeds, all the cheeses (cubed, crumbled, or grated), edible flowers, rainbows of vegetables, fish, meats, exotics (like hearts of palm and artichokes), olives of every color and size, and the hundreds of possible dressings, none of which contain corn syrup.

There are tossed salads (like a Caesar), composed salads (with ingredients placed precisely, like my favorite Nicoise salad), bound salads (stuck together, like tuna). The possibilities are clearly infinite, and to place them all in the same category is confusing.

Chefs of America, I nominate you to make for us not just an American cuisine, but a nomenclature, with real names for real dishes.