FOOD; The Raw and the Cooked

FOR NEARLY A THOUSAND SUMMERS, SALADS HAVE been tossed and turned. One era asks them to be sprightly bites of freshly plucked lettuce meant to invigorate and refresh. Another demands that salads be foils for more substance -- beds for chicken, tuna or lobster; counterpoints to grilled meat, fried bacon, poached eggs, baked cheese. Since the Renaissance, when trade with the Far East and the discovery of America brought hundreds of new vegetables to gardens, salads have mirrored the social appetite.

Wild tumbles of greens and herbs, lightly dressed and minimally arranged, usually accompany periods of romanticism, when nature is honored as a transcendent force. More constrained and arranged salads proliferate when humans become suspicious of nature's caprice. As the salad is tossed, so goes the culture.

Whether free-form or artfully arranged, delicate or sturdy, salads have long evoked leisure. In her book "Perfection Salad," Laura Shapiro writes that by the turn of the century in this country, salads were "perceived as the appropriate food for people who needed something other than blunt, substantial calories from their meals." Professionals known as "brain workers," she writes, "were supposed to prefer light, easily assimilated foods that would leave their minds clear and active."

Perhaps the traditional view of salads as women's food has more to do with "clear and active" minds than with an innate taste for delicate fare. In either case, the appetite for salad has clearly soared as gender distinctions have blurred. Real men now eat salad. And that, along with a cross-cultural culinary influence unmatched since the Renaissance, has contributed to current salad style.

To say that we are in a "heavy" salad phase is not exactly correct. Certainly, the hefty "chef's salad" has transmogrified into "baked chevre salads" and into the mounds of arugula drenched in olive oil that are topped with everything from beef carpaccio to deep-fried veal paillards. But for every bed of watercress welcoming a puck of breaded and baked chevre today, there seems to be a salad of barely dressed organic mesclun, an exotic melange of jicama doused with lime and chilies, a salad of mind-clearing grated black Japanese radish.

The lean and the not-so-lean coexist too constantly to call this an era of heavy salads. Nevertheless, as eating in general has gotten lighter, salads in particular have gotten heavier. Salad has become the great redeemer of all who stray from the dietary straight and narrow: when turned into a salad, almost any food becomes virtuous -- at least in our minds.