May Day Salad

Refreshing, summery salad with herbs, edible flowers, eggs, and cowcumbers

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City/Region: England

Time Period: 1596

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May Day was a time to celebrate the beginning of the year’s best produce and was celebrated with festivities, flowers, and the eating of green dishes.

This salad is light and refreshing and very lovely. Use whatever greens and herbs that you like and however much of them you like, but be aware that some herbs like mint could overpower the flavor if you use too much. This isn’t a salad for heavy dressings like ranch. The greens are the flavor, and the dressing lets them shine.

The lightness and the mix of many different greens, herbs, and flowers is so pretty and the perfect representation of May Day.

“To make a Sallet of all kinde of hearbes.
Take your hearbes and picke them very fine into faire water, and picke your flowers by them selves, and wash them all cleane, and swing them in a strainer, and when you put them in a dish, mingle them with Cowcumbers or Lemmons payred and sliced, and scrape Suger, and put in vinegar and Oyle, and throw the flowers on the top of the Sallet, and of every sorte of the aforesaid things, and garnish the dish about with the foresaide things, and hard Egges boyled and laide about the dish upon the Sallet. ”

— The Good Housewife’s Jewel by Thomas Dawson, 1596

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Ingredients:

Dressing

• 1/2 cup (120 ml) olive oil
• 3 tablespoons (45 ml) vinegar, I used apple cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons (25 g) brown sugar
• A pinch of salt

Salad

Fresh greens like:

• Spinach
• Dandelion greens
• Mint
• Tarragon
• Parsley
• Sage
• Rosemary
• Borage
• Summer savory

• Cucumber
• Hard boiled eggs, sliced
• Fresh edible flowers

Instructions:

1. For the dressing: Whisk the oil and vinegar together. Slowly add the brown sugar, whisking constantly. Whisk in the salt.
2. For the salad: Remove some of the stems from the greens, then toss the greens in a colander and rinse them. While they drain, peel the cucumber, then slice it thinly. Toss it with the greens.
3. Place the greens and cucumber into a serving dish, then top with the hard boiled egg slices and the flowers.
4. Drizzle the dressing over the salad, and serve it forth.

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