Strictly speaking, salad does not exist in traditional Asian cuisines. It’s a Western thing. The word salad itself is derived from the French salade which, in turn, comes from the Latin salata.
However, you will find dishes called salad in modern Asian cooking. They aren’t referred to as salads in local languages but we refer to them as salads because that’s the way we can comprehend and appreciate them.
While they bear similiarities to Western salads, they are more nuanced, and the dressings don’t follow the usual formula of oil + vinegar + seasonings.
At a cooking class in Ho Chi Minh City, we made a salad with grilled beef and herbs, and the dressing was mixed fish sauce.
At a cooking class in Chiang Mai, we made green mango salad with shredded chicken tossed in a dressing that was even more complex (we reproduced it at home and you’ll find a link to the recipe down below).
We learned too that the best way to enjoy it is to place a spoonful on a piece of raw leaf, wrap the leaf around the salad then pop the whole thing into your mouth. The leaf is Piper sarmentosum, the same leaf used to wrap beef in the Vietnamese bo la lot which English publications call betel but is, in fact, not betel.
Are Asian salads spicy? Some are. At a food tour in Thailand, we were taken to a riverside restaurant where a feast was laid out. About a third of the dishes, including the glass noodle salad, remained largely untouched. Too hot!
My daughter, Alex, and I were the only Asians in the group but even we couldn’t manage the intense heat of some of the dishes. An Englishwoman probably in her twenties was seated across the table from Alex and she watched — apprehensively — as Alex tried each dish. Then, she asked Alex if the dish was hot before trying it herself.
Thank goodness, really, for home cooking. When we do our home version of dishes we tried during travel, we can tweak. With Thai salads (many of which are truly delicious), we go easy on the amount of chilies that we use. Below are some of our favorites.
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