A salad bowl is a

bowl A bowl is a typically round dish or container generally used for preparing, serving, storing, or consuming food. The interior of a bowl is characteristically shaped like a spherical cap, with the edges and the bottom, forming a seamless curve ...

-shaped serving dish used to serve

salad A salad is a dish consisting of mixed ingredients, frequently vegetables. They are typically served chilled or at room temperature, though some can be served warm. Condiments called '' salad dressings'', which exist in a variety of flavors, a ...

s, especially tossed salads.

Materials

Salad bowls may be made of any of the usual materials used for tableware, including

ceramic A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant, and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcela ...

metal A metal () is a material that, when polished or fractured, shows a lustrous appearance, and conducts electrical resistivity and conductivity, electricity and thermal conductivity, heat relatively well. These properties are all associated wit ...

plastic Plastics are a wide range of synthetic polymers, synthetic or Semisynthesis, semisynthetic materials composed primarily of Polymer, polymers. Their defining characteristic, Plasticity (physics), plasticity, allows them to be Injection moulding ...

glass Glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline solid, non-crystalline) solid. Because it is often transparency and translucency, transparent and chemically inert, glass has found widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in window pane ...

, or

wood Wood is a structural tissue/material found as xylem in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulosic fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin t ...

. Salad bowls can also be made from renewable materials such as Poly-lactic Acid (PLA), wheat straw fiber and sugarcane

bagasse Bagasse ( ) is the dry pulpy fibrous material that remains after crushing sugarcane or sorghum stalks to extract their juice. It is used as a biofuel for the production of heat, energy, and electricity, and in the manufacture of pulp and building ...

Wood

In the United States from the 1940s to the 1960s, wooden salad bowls were recommended by many cookbooks. This fashion was started by the restaurateur and food writer George Rector, who in 1936 wrote a column entitled "Salad Daze". In that column, he recommended using an unvarnished wooden salad bowl, purportedly a French tradition. He recommended rubbing garlic into it for a hint of garlic flavor, oiling it regularly, and never washing it: Charles Perry, "Cool Food: When Salad Bowls Stalked the Earth", ''Los Angeles Times''
August 20, 1992
/ref> By that Christmas season, wooden salad bowls had become a fashionable gift item, and by 1949, the cultural critic Russell Lynes was saying that a

highbrow Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, "highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. The term, first recorded in 1875, draws its metonymy from the pseud ...

person "wouldn't dream of washing his salad bowl". The wooden salad bowl was criticized soon thereafter, even if it had a finish:

Use

Rubbing garlic on the salad bowl has a long history: Even in the United States, this predates Rector: an American salad cookbook from 1926 recommends it in many recipes.

Shape

Salad bowls may be of any shape and size, from very flat to very tall.

Notes

Salads Tableware Serving and dining {{food-stub