My significant other ate cucumbers and onion with some ranch. I called it a cucumber onion salad. She says there aren’t enough ingredients to call it a salad, because “it takes multiple ingredients”. I pointed out she had three and asked what the minimum is. She refuses to answer so I ask Lemmy.
To me, a salad has always been a dish consisting mostly (if not all) of leafy greens. There are times when I’ll put spinach leaves or chopped iceberg lettuce in a bowl by itself and eat them plain, and I’ll call it a salad.
Adding other chopped/minced/diced/sliced veggies and/or dressing just makes it more of a salad, but a base of leafy greens is, by itself, still a salad. At least, in my personal opinion.
Other foods like “fruit salad” are just borrowing the word salad to give you a baseline sense of its ingredient arrangement, but I personally don’t consider them true salads.
Like how “cow pie” is another word for cow poop, but there is a brand/recipe for chocolate snacks called cow pies. It’s not a real cow pie, but the name alone gives you an idea of what it might consist of (chocolate, peanuts, maybe some peanut butter, etc.).
So here’s the interesting thing: salads with no leafy greens came first. The word (sallet) originally referred to salted vegetables, essentially pickles, which were eaten chopped with a binding sauce (e.g., garum). Think something reminiscent of relish, maybe.
Technically the thing with leafy greens is specifically a “garden salad”, but it’s been the most common type for so long (~400 years) that most folks think of it as the default.