Food History

This is an excuse for an ingredient - I’m having a night off. Salad oil is any oil without too strong a flavour that can be used as a salad dressing base. Canola, sunflower or safflower oil are all handy. I don’t regard olive oil as a ’salad oil’ even though I use it more than any other for salad dressings, because it lends any salad the distinctive aroma of olives.

Why a post about salad oil at all?

I’ve recently been considering terminology. One of the big bugbears of historical cookery is finding out if the writer of the recipe means the same thing by a term as you do. Most of the early nineteenth century recipes we’ve been testing recently have produced questions about sugar, because sugar is described in so many ways.

Food descriptions change and food descriptions vary, which makes it just as important to define ’salad oil’ as to give the botanical name for asafoetida. Both of them give us a shared vocabulary for exploring the culinary past.