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.
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!
One vegetable and dressing is enough if you need a utensil to eat it. Example: cucumber salad.
One, if that ingredient is salad.
Lettuce alone is sufficient, but not necessary. As soon as you omit lettuce it takes multiple ingredients.
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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Can we first define “salad”?
If it’s cold ingredients, mixed together, then wilted iceberg lettuce and a gas station dressing packet is salad.
So two.
German potato salad is served hot. A salad is literally just any ingredients mixed together.
It doesn’t even have to be cold. Look at pasta salad, or anything with grilled chicken or fresh croutons.
I’m not gonna claim a salad can’t be hot, but I think of pasta salads as a cold dish. Maybe it depends where your from.
Potato salad is generally cold too, but there is also hot German potato salad.
Something in a bowl with a dressing is salad.
- Tomatoes + balsamic + olive oil = salad
- Romaine + Caesar dressing = salad
- Canned tuna + mayo = salad
- Cucumber + rice wine vin + sesame oil = salad
Salad is more fun with multiple ingredients, but everything up there is still salad
So by your definition at least two ingredients are required for a salad.
Yes. Dry lettuce in a bowl is not salad.
https://www.justapinch.com/recipes/non-edible/other-non-edible/honeymoon-salad.html
Dry lettuce in a bowl is a honeymoon salad. Lettuce alone, undressed.
Noodles + olive oil + grated Parmesan = salad?
When the doctor tells me to eat more salads, yes
Well, there’s noodle salad. I guess pasta is a hot noodle salad, like cereal in milk is a cold soup.
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! 🤣
Two ingredients must be present for something to be a salad - a vegetable and a dressing. I make all sorts of salads. Some have lettuce, some don’t. I make salad with just fennel and an oil/vinegar dressing. I make salad with tomatoes & cucumbers with a dressing. What she ate was 100% a salad. This is a weird fight.
I dont do dressings. What do you call 15 ingredients and no dressing? A fryless stir fry? Genuinely curious if there’s a word now!
Alright buddy. Here’s your “whole carrot dipped in ranch” salad.
But sticks are more crudite than salad
How do you feel about chicken or tuna salad?
I feel like that’s a grey area because it’s called salad but only in the context a product with dressing (the mayo). but it’s not really a salad, it’s just called chicken salad the way Kraft dinner isn’t really a dinner but it could be a dinner. I say if it only has chicken and mayo, that’s not a salad, that’s a sandwich filling. If it has celery, onion, etc, you could make the argument it was salad.
I feel the same way about cheesecake. It’s really more of a pie if anything.
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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 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)
Soup, salad, or sandwich. In that order.
2 minium?
- A base, such as lettuce, pasta, boiled potato or rice.
- Some salad-worthy veggie or fruit.
I would argue the minimum number of ingredients is two.
Tuna and mayo?
One. But it needs to be a vegetable AND have dressing AND be chopped into bite sized parts AND be raw.
If any of the previous conditions isn’t met, then you need at least two ingredients.
So, yes, cucumbers and onion with ranch most definitely is a salad.
Chicken, boiled eggs and mayonnaise is a salad.
Sure, that’s two ingredients, it checks out.
