Scarborough Fair Goes Way Beyond Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme...

FM Staff

The famous Simon & Garfunkel hit "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" listed the four ingredients above as an ongoing refrain and amateur cooks have been using them together in recipes ever since (actually, the four herbs in combination are a medieval remedy for irregular menstruation, according to Wikipedia).

However, during a different "Scarborough Fair"—the recent Taste of Lawrence Festival in the Scarborough district of Toronto—there was a lot more in the mix. The festival organizers decided that it would be a great publicity stunt to assemble the world's largest multicultural salad at the event. The dish, which could feed 15,000, was designed to celebrate the district's diversity.

The communal concoction was made in a 200-foot-long trough divided into seven sections, each assigned to a different chef making a different ethnic salad: North American, Mediterranian, South Asian, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean and Middle Eastern.

Among other things, it required over 700 cubic meters of romaine lettuce, over a thousand pound each of field greens and spinach, 265 pounds of cherry tomatoes and 30 cases of cucumbers—as much as possible sourced from local growers, by the way. Each chef then devised his own particular recipe for his/her individual ethnic salad section.

Nice touch, but we hope the organizers didn't neglect to go beyond the rabbit food and arrange for some REAL festival grub, like ribs, burgers and sausage sandwiches, plus plenty of suds to wash it all down with. Just to be inclusive, you know...

ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID CLARK