My significant other ate cucumbers and onion with some ranch. I called it a cucumber onion salad. She says there aren’t enough ingredients to call it a salad, because “it takes multiple ingredients”. I pointed out she had three and asked what the minimum is. She refuses to answer so I ask Lemmy.
As long as there’s no structural starch it’s a salad https://cuberule.com/
Last time I tossed a salad it was two ingredients, so I think you’re correct.
To me, a salad has always been a dish consisting mostly (if not all) of leafy greens. There are times when I’ll put spinach leaves or chopped iceberg lettuce in a bowl by itself and eat them plain, and I’ll call it a salad.
Adding other chopped/minced/diced/sliced veggies and/or dressing just makes it more of a salad, but a base of leafy greens is, by itself, still a salad. At least, in my personal opinion.
Other foods like “fruit salad” are just borrowing the word salad to give you a baseline sense of its ingredient arrangement, but I personally don’t consider them true salads.
Like how “cow pie” is another word for cow poop, but there is a brand/recipe for chocolate snacks called cow pies. It’s not a real cow pie, but the name alone gives you an idea of what it might consist of (chocolate, peanuts, maybe some peanut butter, etc.).
Carrot-raisin salad is a salad.
It has two core ingredients: carrot and raisin.
It’s often served with a mayo-based dressing, and sometimes pineapple. But neither of those are required.
Lettuce alone is sufficient, but not necessary. As soon as you omit lettuce it takes multiple ingredients.
My nana calls that the “honeymoon salad”, lettuce alone
Ha! You beat me to it. My dad loved that joke.
“Do you have honeymoon salad?”
“What’s honeymoon salad?”
“Lettuce alone, without dressing.”
That’s a terrible honeymoon.
More like, “been married for 30 years salad”, amirite?? /BoomerHumor
I mean, the lettuce might be wilted but as long as you wash it I guess it’s fine. Not like they’ve been feasting, so they’re probably famished.
Also the conditions for a salad grow stronger. If there’s lettuce there’s no worry about adding hot ingredients but if it’s a potato salad you’re only making fancy mashed potatoes if it’s hot.
So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it’s a salad.
However, I like to think that dishes’ ingredients aren’t a taxonomic thing, they’re a probabilistic thing. In other words, there’s no such thing as “not salad” or “salad”, only shades of saladness.
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Serve it cold? Ok it’s saladier
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It’s made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still
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Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish
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They’re mixed together? Even more salad like
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They’ve got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it’s very likely a salad!
… and so on. To me, your SO’a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm
Is there anyway to convert a Salad Probability^tm into a Salad Factor score?
Give me weights for the coefficients and I’ll construct a matrix
Here’s some example weights for a salad factor
Lettuce - 10
Spinach - 9
Arugula - 7
Cabbage - 7
Tomato- 6
Carrots- 6
Cucumber - 5
Onion - 4
Olives (black) 4
Anchovies - 1
There are a few missing points in there IMO, like which of your ingredient is cooked, or how are they sliced? Graped carrots rises the score, but cook them and it’s less likely to be a salad. Diced radish? Not in my salad, especially not cooked, but thinly sliced raw radish definitely belongs. And don’t even get me started on tomatoes.
Damn, I’m not sure the two are compatible then. The salad factor score is meant to be super easy so people don’t get overwhelmed by all the possibilities and variations.
What we need is a salad categorizing multilayer neural network
It wouldn’t be hard to train on obvious salads, but what about the non obvious ones? Who do we trust to properly label these as salad or not a salad?
“Saladier” is my new favorite word of the day.
TIL salad is a spectrum.
I think this is one of those words / concepts where one needs to invoke Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” idea. You’re not going to find some exact set of criteria that define what people do and don’t consider a salad. They instead have a “family resemblance”.
Your probably idea is not a bad way of describing how that works.
I know, I was being humorous but it is in fact the way most categorization works. Very seldom is it a taxonomy; the way we recognize faces, voices, shapes, etc … it’s all probabilistic.
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Well, the cube rule of food says anything without a starch/bread is a salad, if you want an absurd authority to point to: https://cuberule.com/
Looks at breakdown of the cube rule: Yeah, okay. That all makes perfect sense.
Looks at examples that follow the cube rule: YOU MONSTERS!!
This is hilarious! What a beautiful, pointless discussion! I love it! 🤣
So steak or chocolate are salads and a salad is a nacho, got it!
Potato salad is sad now
lettuce in a bowl is salad.
To me, it has to have dressing. Otherwise it’s just lettuce in a bowl.
Pop a drizzle of oil on it? BOOM SALD
Quick edit: plug for saladguy12, who just hit DAY TWO THOUSAND
I think 1 ingredient can be a salad as long as it’s a very salady ingredient.
Lettuce?
Lettuce IS the salad.
It’s literally called salad (Salat) in German.
How about spinach?
Yeah that gives me salad vibes
Raw? Yes. Cooked? Hell no.
I would probably still call dressing on just lettuce a salad, although I would say it’s an unusually basic one. 3 ingredients definitely counts.
Dressing already needs at least 3
By some definitions of ingredient, I see what you’re saying, although it might be a simple vinaigrette with two individually obtainable ingredients. However, OP implied they consider dressing one ingredient in the OP, so I went by identity previous to tossing as opposed to identity at any stage of the process.
Do you make your vinaigrette without salt and pepper and maybe those don’t count? The ingredient science is very complex
Do you make your vinaigrette without salt and pepper
I do, actually. For whatever reason I don’t like most dressings but I enjoy just olive oil and a nice balsamic.
One, if that ingredient is salad.
Removed by mod
Been there and found out that If you dig deep enough almost everything is either a salad or a soup
A soup is just a salad with a lot of dressing.
Soup is just liquid salad.
Fight me.
Soup, salad, or sandwich. In that order.
Soup and salad are the same thing, just with a different ratio of solids to liquids.
I guess it depends on the language, in my native language I think all foods could be defined as either a salad or a soup (even a sandwich is just a kind of soup)
All you need is lettuce and salt. “Salad” is derived from the latin for salt: sal
Oh i see… sal ad… ad sal… add salt… That’s pretty neat!
I would argue the minimum number of ingredients is two.
Tuna and mayo?
Tuna and mayo it is.
Ham, cheese, and mayo?
Ham, cheese, and mayo it is.
Ham, cheese, mayo, and some croutons.
Or how about ham, cheese, mayo on some crunchy crusty bread (otherwise known as toast).
Ham and cheese toasted sandwich is now a salad.
