Salads consist of two parts. The body that can be any basic food, cooked or raw and the dressing (the fashionable term is sauce). The dressing is either applied just before serving or, if it is to marinate the ingredients, hours before. When you dress the salad just before serving, the dressing is meant to provide flavor and mouthfeel to the otherwise mild crunchy vegetables.

If the dressing is a marinade, it can take several hours or several days to alter the flavors, textures and consistency of the foods that make up the salad. Ordinary tossed green lettuce salads are considered passé in today’s food circles and
better restaurants. The trend is to mix unusual combinations or exotic, wild, even unheard-of ingredients. The new rule is, if no deaths have been directly attributed to a plant material and it looks out of the ordinary, add it to the salad bowl. Anything edible, from tiny flowers to furry twigs, flavorful to bland, bitter to sweet, has been, or at this very moment is being tried. Vivid colors, curly shapes and wispy, twisted textures are all in demand.
Some of the more established nouvelle cuisine ingredients include dried tomato, radicchio, chicory, fiddlehead ferns, all kinds of sprouts, arugula, mâche, dandelion, endive, sorrel, baby vegetables and baby greens, flowers and herbs.
Combined with the basic salad fixings, these ingredients create beautiful and appetizing plates with minimal additional work for the cook. But how to find them and how much they are going to set you back at the checkout counter is another problem. They are certainly not for the everyday meal.