There is a salad that has little salad in it. It has white sausage, black sausage, Catalan sausage, ham, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies and, if you're not careful, tuna or sardines in oil. Below (or next to) that sea of meat and fat appears the lettuce, some radishes to give color, some strips of red pepper, onion and some tomato wedges, all topped by a handful of olives. It is seasoned with oil, salt and vinegar. This is the recipe for the so-called 'Catalan salad' according to the Corpus of Catalan Cuisine.
Popular in bars and restaurants since the late 70s, l'amanida catalana responds more to the second meaning that defines 'salad': "Confusing mixture of unconnected things." It is, without a doubt, the salad for those who don't like salad. Accompanied by some bread, it would almost be a complete dish and, in fact, if everything were served separately, it would not be far from a classic cold dinner.
However, it was common to order it as a starter or first course, a category in which it still exists in daily menus and mountain inns, where the local sausages display their excellence. Perhaps, the Catalan salad is precisely that: a green excuse to order a good plate of cold cuts.
For Núria Bàguena, researcher and student of the history of cuisine, the Catalan salad does not exist as a concept: “it is an invention of the hospitality industry.” The salad, Bàguena comments, was never an individual dish as such. “The fresh vegetable salads were arranged on the table communally, on a large plate or tray from which all the diners snacked throughout the meal.”
According to the researcher, the proposal was born from the new dietary trends that came with force in the 70s and 80s and that opted for a less caloric diet. "The salad ends up being introduced into homes and also into restaurants, where there were only elaborate and French-style salads, like the Niçoise salad or the asparagus salad, for example." Home cooking and hospitality cuisine are different and feed off each other but, in this case, it was hospitality cuisine that created the name of this dish and gave it its name, “which is still a tourist name, because it does not really represent what What is Catalan cuisine?
However, in Pallars there is a salad very similar to the so-called 'Catalan salad', the pork salad. According to Vicent Marqués in História de la cuina Catalana i Occitan (Sidillà, 2018), leave ham, bringuera, butifarra de lengua, xolís, robellones confitados lettuce, oil, vinegar and salt. "These are very cold regions and the pork sausages appreciate it, the cold helps to cure them in a convenient way. But there it is customary to add them to salads (as in all of Catalonia), but they make one where the main ingredient is sausages and ham (...) in season they add Cardós pears, which are similar to olla o de invierno". However, in Pallars there is a salad very similar to the one called 'salada catalana', the pork salad. According to Vicent Marqués in História de la cuina Catalana i Occitan (Sidillà, 2018), leave ham, bringuera, butifarra de lengua, xolís, robellones confitados lettuce, oil, vinegar and salt. "They are very cold regions and the pork sausages appreciate it, the cold helps to cure them in a convenient way. But there it is customary to add them to salads (as in all of Catalonia), but they make one where the main ingredient is sausages and ham (...) in season they add Cardós pears, which are similar to pot or winter".
Chef Pau Gascó, from the Follia restaurant, agrees with her. “It seems quite reductionist to me that sausages are considered to make the salad Catalan.” Furthermore, he believes that as a dish it is not very successful: “I don't really understand its meaning, neither conceptually nor organoleptically. I think sausages don't work well on top of fresh vegetables, or in combination with them.”
For his part, the historian of Catalan cuisine, Jaume Fàbrega, points out in his book El gust d'un poble: els most famous plats de la cuina Catalana (Cossetània, 2002) that the Catalan salad is common in restaurants throughout Catalonia but that it is, originally, a popular dish that did not have a fixed name or all the typical ingredients, something that we owe to the transition from domestic to professional cuisine. “Its origin, certainly, is the splendorous snack that was made in the summer in the peasant houses, coinciding with the arduous tasks of reaping and beating”, something that, he relates, is reflected in many harvest songs, which we already noted in the article Why we snack less and less, where we remember the typical rural snacks of the late 19th century. “The adjective [Catalan] appeared in the 1930s,” says Fàbrega, adding that “it seems like a masterful formula if two conditions are met: the freshness and goodness of the vegetable element (and the oil) and the quality of the sausages.” .
