Aha! The very summit of good taste turns out to be simple green salad. You could stare down that haughty waiter by ordering salad and be perfectly correct even by the standards of the awesome Hippolyte Arnion. In fact, Rector actually recommended that every man learn how to mix oil-and-vinegar dressing so that, if need be, he could "bully" the waiter into bringing the ingredients to the table and mix it himself.

It's obvious to us now that Rector invented the whole salad bowl thing just to add some spice to his article. French people certainly don't make salad in wooden bowls (though most Americans were in no position to know this 56 years ago). And Parisians such as Hippolyte Arnion never put garlic in sauce vinaigrette-as Rector was quite aware, since he had apprenticed in a Paris restaurant. In fact, Rector had already published garlic-less vinegar-and-oil dressing recipes in his cookbooks.

The article was a sensation in its time, and men who distrusted fussiness in the kitchen liked to quote the passage about Arnion's green salad ("fit for a man to eat") that "looked like a truck garden after a cyclone has passed through." With this article Rector had launched the wooden salad bowl industry-and incidentally, forged such a close association between salad and freshly ground pepper that for decades, restaurants offered fresh pepper only with salad, while putting out stale pepper in pepper shakers for everything else.