The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in sweet jelly. It is a hangover from the middle of the last century, when – in a perfect confluence – canned goods, especially otherwise unavailable fruit, and mass-produced gelatine simultaneously became easily available. The American housewife ran with it, and inexplicably called it a salad.

Salad can be maximalist, with everything thrown at it. Bacon! Anchovies! Grapes! Marshmallows!

Listen, I know that language changes, taste changes, what and how we eat changes. But I still don’t feel comfortable calling a combination of whipped cream, apple slices and chopped-up Snickers bars a ‘Snicker salad’. And, frankly, that’s not even one of the worst offenders: there’s........

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