Salads are my go-to meal when the days heat up and I was curious about their place in the culinary history of Los Angeles. What types of salads were Angelenos making and eating in the early 20th century? I went searching in the Los Angeles Public Library’s collections and resources for salads and salad making in Los Angeles and found quite a few interesting things.
First, I perused two of the library’s oldest Los Angeles-based cookbooks, Los Angeles Cookery (1881) and How We Cook in Los Angeles (1894). Both were written as church fundraisers and feature recipes supplied by prominent local women. Curiously, salad recipes in Los Angeles Cookery were found in the chapter on Sauces. Homemade mayonnaise was the most popular “sauce” for salads. The book had seven mayonnaise recipes in the short chapter, each with various additions such as sugar, mustard or cayenne. Chicken salad was the most popular salad– represented by multiple recipes– followed by potato salad and cabbage salad. Salads were treated to their own chapter in How We Cook in Los Angeles. Here French dressing joined the mayonnaise recipes, and salads include fruit and vegetable salads as well as a number of seafood salads, all of which highlight their specific ingredient.
While searching in historical local newspapers I was intrigued to read about the “salad makers” themselves. [It was even an occupation designation on the census!] Los Angeles city directories listed the professionals with the designation ‘salad mkr’. Many of those listed worked at cafeterias and tea rooms. According to these early twentieth century newspapers, the qualities that made an excellent salad maker included the ability to mix complementary ingredients in a specific order, and the successful blending of mayonnaise sauces. Salad maker tips included their preference for tearing lettuce leaves instead of cutting them, the encouragement to use wooden implements, and the practical advice of adding bell peppers and cucumbers on the side of the plate as garnish so they could be picked off the salad if desired.
The library’s menu collection, some of which is digitized and available on their website, is another great way to learn what types of salads Angelenos were eating. For example, a few of the salads listed on a seventy-year-old Musso & Frank menu in the library’s holdings can still be ordered at the restaurant today, including the Avocado Salad, Chiffonade Salad and Musso-Frank Special. Meanwhile, a Smoke House menu from a similar era shows how their salad options have grown considerably. In the 1950s you could order a chef’s salad or fruit salad, while today you can also get a beet & quinoa salad, or their barbecued chicken salad. You can even order Hollywood's legendary Cobb salad at the Smoke House restaurant in Burbank, or you can try making a variation of the original at home. A recipe for Robert Cobb’s salad can be found in The Brown Derby Cookbook (1949) available at the Central Library. It is interesting to note that the recipe’s salad greens included iceberg, romaine, watercress and chicory. Many of the Brown Derby recipes feature their French dressing, which according to the cookbook was bottled and sold to the public. I gotta say, their French dressing recipe was easier to perfect than the mayonnaise recipes we tried!
