Editor's note: This essay has been nominated for a 2008 James Beard Award for magazine feature writing. To visit Barbara Kafka's blog, click here.

Apple pie deserves its due, but in truth it is salad that has represented, perhaps more definitively than any other food, American attitudes toward eating and cooking. The salads that have come into and, in some cases, gone out of vogue over the years are telling reflections of American tastes at a given moment in time, from mid-20th-century curiosities like marshmallow salad and poinsettia salad (the latter being a ball of cream cheese topped with French dressing and served over pineapple slices and canned pimiento) to perennially satisfying national classics like the caesar and the cobb to contemporary favorites like the tri-colore, a mixture of red, green, and white lettuces like arugula, radicchio, and belgian endive. Salad tells us about the roles of women in this country—who went from being farm wives to being busy professionals—and about how much our eating habits, from the order of courses to our obsession with dieting, have changed over the decades. Salad tells the story of food in America. It is who we are.

Although salad as we know it now seems to be an inevitable part of the American meal, it hasn't always been so. The practice of assembling fresh greens (for a glossary of popular greens, see A Guide To Greens) and vegetables or, sometimes, fruit, cooked meats, eggs, or shellfish on a plate and adding dressing evolved over time, responding to changing tastes and—just as important—to the influence of other countries' cuisines. First and foremost, I give bows to the French, whose cooking continues to inform ours and who have traditionally served, in bistros and other informal restaurants, a small lettuce salad, often in a glass bowl, after the main course.

The simple salade verte, that progenitor of countless other green salads, is most often made with soft, mild lettuces such as boston or butter lettuce, and dressed with a vinaigrette, often with mustard added as an emulsifier. It was presumably an affection for this de rigueur end-of-meal salad that caused my French friends, after their tours of America in the '60s, to throw up their hands in horror and exclaim, "Can you believe it? They serve the salad before the meal!" At the time, I didn't have the heart to point out to them that not only do we serve salads prior to the main course but sometimes they are the main course.

My friends' indignation notwithstanding, it wasn't long before the French themselves were occasionally serving a substantial first-course salad, usually a salade gastronomique, of haricots verts, foie gras, and crayfish or the like. Indeed, in the south of France, a tradition of more-filling salads already existed—witness the salade niçoise, that sturdy combination of tuna, potatoes, and yet more haricots verts.

On the other shore of the Mediterranean and across the Middle East, a rich tradition of salads and saladlike dishes has long been in place and, in recent decades, has heavily influenced American menus. Accompaniments to a meal in many Mediterranean countries include dishes like tabbouleh (bulgur wheat with lemon and parsley) and tsatsiki, a cooling mixture of cucumbers and yogurt. Similarly, we have come to embrace a wealth of Asian salads, like those of Thailand composed of grilled beef or shrimp and dressed with lime juice and fish sauce, as well as those of Latin American countries, which encompass everything from fresh fruit to cactus, beans, and corn.

Still, when looking at the broader history of American salad, it's useful to circle back to Europe—to the French (of course), to the Germans (think of potato salad), and, perhaps most significantly, to the English. The first English book on the subject of salads was Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets by John Evelyn, published in 1699. It is remarkably comprehensive, covering a wide variety of edible plants, and also prescient of trends to come centuries later, in that it lists the health-giving properties of various greens. The idea that raw vegetables and greens could be good for people had often been met with suspicion, in England and elsewhere, and boiling them was frequently the most popular means of preparation because it was thought that in their uncooked form they were hard to digest.

Salad making in America dates to the early days of European settlement. Thomas Jefferson, one of our most serious gardeners, left us his own catalogue of early salad ingredients in his Garden Book, a lovingly detailed horticultural diary that documented the founding father's investigations in gardening from 1766 to 1824; it was compiled and published by Edwin Morris Betts in 1944. Lettuce first appears in a 1767 entry. By 1774, Jefferson was planting radicchio di pistoia and wild endive. In 1813 he gave an extensive list of salad greens and lettuces. A few years later, in 1824, in The Virginia House-wife, Mary Randolph describes a simple salad made from greens taken from the garden.