I thought I was so smart, googling for “small composed salad” earlier today. In a moment of reflection, I tried a more permissive search, for what occurred to me as being the likely minimal unit of meaning: “composed salad“.

Lo. Behold. Some 10,000 hits, including the page containing this explanatory quote:

“A composed salad, according to On Cooking: Techniques from Expert Chefs (Prentice Hall, 1999) by Sarah R. Labensky and Alan Hause, is a salad that usually uses greens as a base and is built by artistically arranging a variety of other ingredients on a plate.”

So it’s industry lingo, this composed salad. (And now I will think of flower arrangments next time I sit down to a colorful bowl of greens. Dammit.)

The term is apparently adapted from French, according to this definition attributed to The New Food Lover’s Companion, 1995:

“A salad in which the ingredients are artfully arranged, rather than tossed together. The dressing for a composed salad is usually drizzled over the top of the ingredients. In French the term is known as salade composée.”

And it looks like the (presumably older) French term is on much more solid ground: a google for the French name produces 62,000 hits, fully five times the number for the English version.

What an educational afternoon.