COOL FOOD : When Salad Bowls Stalked the Earth

Once upon a time, Americans believed that if you wanted a green salad, you had to mix it in a particular kind of bowl--a bowl of plain, unvarnished wood that could never be washed, only wiped with a cloth. From the 1940s to the ‘60s, countless American cookbooks referred to this all-important wooden salad bowl.

But during the ‘60s, food writers as various as Michael Field and Mike Roy began attacking the wooden bowl. They pointed out that the unfinished wood absorbed salad dressing, and the salad oil sat there in the wood getting more and more rancid with the years. As a result, those wooden salad bowls stank to high heaven.

Well, what can we say? We Americans--and particularly we salad-mad Californians--knew what those bowls smelled like, and we knew that the smell was going into our salads, but we thought that was how it was supposed to be. We thought we were making our salads in the very most rigorous and classical French way. We thought we were gradually approaching perfection.

We had actually been sold a bill of goods by a sly old dog named George Rector. He was the son of the turn-of-the-century New York restaurateur Charles Rector, whose establishment used to be mentioned in the same breath with New York’s famous Delmonico’s (understandably, because Charles Rector had hired away a lot of Delmonico’s staff). Rector’s was the flashiest American restaurant of its day--the first building in this country to feature a revolving door, among other things.

Its flashiness eventually backfired. During the teens of the century, business fell off and Charles Rector decided to hire some ragged children to stare at the diners through the restaurant’s windows. He thought his customers would be grateful to feel among the privileged few, but people actually considered this gimmick to be in shocking taste. The bad publicity helped ruin Rector’s.

However, George Rector had already become a food celebrity. One of his father’s best customers had been the celebrity financier and gourmand “Diamond Jim” Brady, whose favorite dish was sole Marguery. In the early years of the century, George was sent to Paris to apprentice at Restaurant Marguery in order to spy out the recipe so Rector’s could serve it for Brady. When George returned to New York, Diamond Jim is said to have stood on the dock, bellowing above the noise of the crowd, “Did you get the recipe?”

George became a cookery writer after the restaurant closed, and from 1934 to 1936 he published a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post that were later collected in a book entitled “Dine at Home With Rector.” His photos show a jolly old sport with a mischievous smile and a rakish white mustache, and the articles, with titles such as “The Height of Shellfishness,” “A Touch of Eggomania” and “You Know Me Al Fresco,” had the sprightly, preeningly hedonistic tone that some food writers favored at the time, probably in reaction to the puritanism that had recently given the country Prohibition. It was in the Sept. 5, 1936 issue of the Saturday Evening Post that he published the fateful article “Salad Daze.”

Generally what Rector had to say in his articles was quite sound. Way back in the ‘30s, he was already recommending that vegetables be steamed. He single-handedly revived the pepper mill. But while “Salad Daze” helped put Americans into the habit of eating green salad, it also created the myth of the unwashable wooden salad bowl.

To understand how we could have fallen for the myth and ignored the plain evidence of our own noses, you have to remember that in the ‘30s, green salad was something of an exotic mystery food. To most Americans, salad still meant either gelatine salad or something like tuna or potato salad: cooked meat or vegetables bound with mayonnaise or boiled dressing.

You also have to remember how Americans felt about French food at the time. By the beginning of the 20th Century, American city dwellers had started to overcome their patriotic prejudices and were beginning to admit that there was something to French haute cuisine. The French mastery of the kitchen made us feel culturally inferior, but in the natural course of things we would soon have learned enough about French cuisine to overcome our unease, as we eventually did in the 1980s.

However, Prohibition kept things from following their natural course because it effectively closed every French restaurant in the country. When Prohibition was repealed, French restaurants were able to open again, but by that time there was a Depression going on. And unfortunately, French food, by its very nature, tended to be more expensive than American.

In order to justify their higher prices, it seems, Depression-era French restaurants instinctively pressed every cultural-inferiority button Americans had. The idea solidified in the American mind that a French restaurant was a terrifying place where a haughty waiter would force you to order in French, sneer at your choices and stare at you as you tasted your wine as if looking for signs that you were unworthy of it.

Rector pushed those same cultural-inferiority buttons in his article. He started out by comparing the conventionally perfectionistic French chefs to royalty. To illustrate, he recalled a time when he was going off to catch a train with Hippolyte Arnion, the late chef of the Cafe de Paris.

Arnion was so finicky, Rector wrote, that when he noticed a tiny wrinkle in his top hat, he refused to move from the spot until the hat was sent out to be blocked, even though this meant that he--and Rector--had to miss their train. “ Ca ne fait rien, mon ami Georges ,” said Arnion. “There are always trains. We artists must occupy ourselves with details like that.”

Needless to say, Arnion was terrifically particular about his food. And lo and behold, he ate hardly anything but green salad.

“What Hippolyte tossed lovingly together,” wrote Rector, “and ate with the expression of little Johann Sebastian Bach playing the clavichord by moonlight had no nonsense about it. It was made of fresh green stuff and a dressing with an oil and vinegar base, in a wooden bowl with a wooden fork and spoon to mix and serve with, and it looked like a truck garden after a cyclone has passed through. In other words, a dish fit for a man to eat.”

Aha! The very summit of good taste turns out to be simple green salad. You could stare down that haughty waiter by ordering salad and be perfectly correct even by the standards of the awesome Hippolyte Arnion. In fact, Rector actually recommended that every man learn how to mix oil-and-vinegar dressing so that, if need be, he could “bully” the waiter into bringing the ingredients to the table and mix it himself.

But what was to go into this dressing? Oil, vinegar, freshly ground pepper (“from one of those intriguing little French pepper mills which look like an old-fashioned wooden inkstand”) . . . and garlic, “which is the be-all and end-all of the matter.” But garlic, people believed in the ‘30s, was dangerous. It must be used “with the care of a medieval alchemist mixing powdered unicorn’s horn into the elixir of life.”

How could we be sure not to put in too little or--God forbid--too much garlic? Well, Rector wrote (spinning another myth), one old-time chef used to chew a clove and then breathe lightly into the bowl. But the easiest way to get just enough garlic in your salad was to rub the bowl with a cut clove.

But here was the catch; it had to be a wooden bowl. If it were china, you wouldn’t rub off exactly the right amount.

In the last two paragraphs of the story, Rector introduced the final element. If cheese is used in a salad, he wrote, it should be well aged, the dressing is all the better for a little aging; “and age has everything to do with the bowl . . . . Wood, you see, is absorbent, and after you’ve been rubbing your bowl with garlic and anointing it with oil for some years, it will have acquired the patina of a Corinthian bronze and the personality of a 100-year-old brandy.”

He had such a bowl himself, of course: “Thirty years of sheer joy have oiled and polished and savored it until it is as distinguished an object as a 2,000-year-old Chinese shrine made of sandalwood.”

In a sense, people may have been ready to accept a funny smell from their wooden salad bowls because of the garlic, but this must be the real reason they never thought of complaining. Rector had already offered protection against humiliation at the hands of foreign waiters, and here was an unexpected bonus--a distinguished culinary object that the ordinary American could produce, like a cellar-master aging wine, by blindly following a simple instruction.

I think it’s obvious that Rector’s myth was aimed particularly at men. The wooden bowl sounded brisk and no-nonsense, and the business of leaving it unwashed would have reminded them of breaking in a Meerschaum pipe. Men, of course, were generally more ignorant about food than women, but they were also the ones who would have to face the full brunt of that terrifying waiter if the family ever found itself surrounded by a French restaurant.

The article had an overnight effect. “Thanks to George Rector,” wrote Cora, Rose and Bob Brown in their 1937 book “10,000 Snacks: A Cookbook,” “wooden salad bowls appeared on every fancy gift counter last Christmas to the tune of $3 or $4 for what should be the old-fashioned wooden chopping bowl once present in every kitchen for two bits.”

Ironically, the Browns pointed out, most of these bowls were varnished “and no better than glass or china ones when it comes to furnishing a rough surface to rub the garlic over and an absorbent one to hold the flavors, growing better and better with age. The true salad lover must sandpaper off at least $2 worth of finish before his bowl is ready for use.” For decades, well-intentioned food writers like the Browns helpfully reminded everybody at every opportunity to make their salad the correct (that is, the hideously wrong) way.

It’s obvious to us now that Rector invented the whole salad bowl thing just to add some spice to his article. French people certainly don’t make salad in wooden bowls (though most Americans were in no position to know this 56 years ago). And Parisians such as Hippolyte Arnion never put garlic in sauce vinaigrette--as Rector was quite aware, since he had apprenticed in a Paris restaurant. In fact, Rector had already published garlic-less vinegar-and-oil dressing recipes in his cookbooks.

But the article was a sensation in its time, and men who distrusted fussiness in the kitchen liked to quote the passage about Arnion’s green salad (“fit for a man to eat”) that “looked like a truck garden after a cyclone has passed through.” With this article Rector had launched the wooden salad bowl industry--and incidentally, forged such a close association between salad and freshly ground pepper that for decades, restaurants offered fresh pepper only with salad, while putting out stale pepper in pepper shakers for everything else.

No wonder he had such a sly, mischievous smile. He’d hoaxed a whole country.