American salads are weird – but an egg salad is perfect

The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in sweet jelly. It is a hangover from the middle of the last century, when – in a perfect confluence – canned goods, especially otherwise unavailable fruit, and mass-produced gelatine simultaneously became easily available. The American housewife ran with it, and inexplicably called it a salad.

Listen, I know that language changes, taste changes, what and how we eat changes. But I still don’t feel comfortable calling a combination of whipped cream, apple slices and chopped-up Snickers bars a ‘Snicker salad’. And, frankly, that’s not even one of the worst offenders: there’s Coca-Cola salad, which combines strawberry jelly, tinned pineapple, cherry pie filling and Coca-Cola.

And it’s not just the terminology, but the actual contents of these dishes. Is it better or worse if the salad is in fact savoury? Perfection salad – a non-ironic name, seemingly – contains olives, celery, often cabbage and carrot, and pineapple, all suspended in a sweet lemon jelly. There are ‘barbecue’ salads which combine lemon jelly (again) with the components needed for barbecue sauce, all set in moulds, and then ‘placed on crisp greens with mayonnaise’. I’ll pass on that one. These dishes, particularly in the Midwest where they are most beloved, pop up everywhere. They are not a novelty, but an integral part of a celebration. At the Thanksgiving table, a creamy, jelly-laden salad will often be rubbing shoulders with a beautifully roasted bird, mashed potato and stuffing.

To those not indoctrinated, it seems bizarre.