Imagine, you are a glass maker, working on making bottles to use for salad oil. You have already blown the glass into the moulds, and they have come out beautifully. Now, you just need to assemble the pieces of the bottles so that they can be sold. It is nearing the end of the day and you have been working on putting the bottles together for some time, heating the glass and pressing the pieces together, over and over again. Then, as you put the last bottle together, you slip and the neck goes on crooked.
When I took these bottles to show the children, they were intrigued, particularly by the one with a crooked neck. The bottles are beautifully decorated and very attractive, especially when compared to the modern bottles they are used to. What really intrigued them though was the way one of the bottles was made crooked - as they said 'it's all wonky'. They could not imagine anybody today keeping or selling a bottle with such an imperfection, and were amazed to discover that in the past it would have been used regardless of its incorrect shape.
If you ask many elderly people, they will tell you that oil used to be purchased in small bottles from the chemist and was quite expensive. Yet salad oil bottles are very common and suggest that oil was used in cooking, at least to dress salads. Salads actually have a remarkably long history and throughout history many of the ingredients would have been found growing wild nearby. The Romans and Greeks both ate salad in the form of mixed green leaves and raw vegetables. After the fall of the Roman Empire the Babylonians continued to eat salads, though salad was out of favour in Western Europe. During the Renaissance, salads began to regain popularity, reintroduced to the west via Spain and Italy. At this time 'dinner salads', or those which were a full meal were popular, and in the 18th century layered salads were popular.
So, when was salad oil introduced? Again, salad oil goes right back to Roman times, when it was used to dress salads. Babylonians used a mix of oil and vinegar in dressing their salads, much like a modern salad dressing. Throughout history, oil continued to be used in dressing salads, but as the popularity of salads waxed and waned, so did the popularity of salad oil. In America, salad was popular in the 19th century, but it had fallen out of favour elsewhere and it wasn't until the second half of the 20th century that salad regained popularity in other areas of the world. Salad oil was still available, but it wasn't used as readily. In fact, oil was used for various other purposes, including in medicine, instead.
