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.

There’s a sort of upheaval going on in the food-service stratum of my workplace; a recent re-jiggering of the employee benefit plan includes the sudden and complete cessation of a long-running 50% food discount at the various little food outlets in our buildings. The cafe in the building in which I don’t work had a little going out of business party just before new years — they didn’t want to bother trying to hack it charging full price — and the coffee stand in this building has introduced frequent-drinker punch cards. Buy 9, get one free, that sort of thing.

And the cafe in this building is advertising some specials for the new year, including something that I can’t quite make sense of:

small composed salad

It’s a salad, and small, that much I can work with unflinchingly. But it is also, uh, composed? Whence? Is the notion that, yes, your salad comes pre-built, no assembly required? Is it a calm, rational salad? Is there a musical theme?

Did they, god help us, misspell compost?

Google doesn’t offer any explanation. A search for “small composed salad” gave me 7 hits, including some redundancies (I look forward to being number 8). And none of them convinced me there was any argument for the unpuncutated “small composed salad”.

I don’t really know who Murs is yet, and certainly can’t confirm nor deny vis-a-vis Murs Rules the World being an accurate album title, but I have a hard time not liking a lyric like this:

Ima dedicated this album
To everyone who cried
When they killed Optimus Prime