For about a generation, the wooden salad bowl was a mark of a serious American cook. In the United States from the 1940s to the 1960s, many cookbooks recommended one, and the fashion came with a peculiar rule: rub the bowl with garlic, oil it, and never wash it. The rule did not last. The bowl did, and today it is cared for the way any wooden kitchen piece should be, washed by hand, dried and oiled.

The story of how a bowl became a status symbol, and then a cautionary tale, says a good deal about how Americans learned to cook.

A restaurateur’s idea

The fashion is usually traced to George Rector, a restaurateur, raconteur and food authority. His family’s restaurant on Broadway in New York drew celebrities in the 1910s and closed with the arrival of Prohibition. Rector went on to write cookbooks and a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post.

In a 1936 column for that magazine, Rector recommended an unvarnished wooden salad bowl and presented it as a French tradition. His instructions were to rub garlic into the bowl, oil it regularly and never wash it. Years of oil and garlic, he argued, would give a bowl character in the way age gives it to bronze or brandy. “Wood, you see, is absorbent,” he wrote.

Readers took him at his word. By that Christmas season, wooden salad bowls had become a fashionable gift item.

The garlic rub was older

Rector did not invent the garlic. Rubbing a salad bowl with garlic has a long history: a French history of private life, in its 1815 edition, describes rubbing the bowl with garlic crushed with a crust of bread.

In the United States, an American salad cookbook from 1926 already recommended the rub in many of its recipes, a decade before Rector’s column.

What Rector added was the wood, the oil and the refusal to wash. Put together, they turned a seasoning trick into a ritual.

A badge of taste

By the late 1940s the unwashed bowl had become shorthand for sophistication. The cultural critic Russell Lynes, whose 1949 essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” sorted American tastes into high, middle and low, later counted “an unwashed salad bowl” among the things that had once passed for highbrow.

It is easy to see the appeal. A big wooden bowl looked generous on the table and suited a casual, help-yourself dinner. Its darkening surface suggested years of good dinners. And the rule itself, a little mysterious and a little European, gave the cook something to know that others did not.

Mid-century design kept wood in the dining room too. Jens Quistgaard designed trays, bowls and other pieces in staved teak for Dansk Designs, the American company founded after Ted and Martha Nierenberg sought him out on a 1954 trip to Europe, and his work for Dansk was a success in the United States from the beginning.

The critics

The trouble with the rule was the oil. A salad bowl that is never washed collects dressing, and most dressings are built on oil.

Critics saw it early. Writing in Gourmet in 1945, Louis DeGouy warned that the finish on cheap and badly made bowls would soon crack, that oil would seep into the crevices and eventually go rancid, and that frequent garlic rubbing could turn a faint undertone into an objectionable odor. In 1965, Michael Field granted that bowls become seasoned with constant use, particularly if they are never washed, but wrote that oil and food particles inevitably collect in the cracks and become rancid.

Stale oil, not garlic, was the real problem. The fashion faded, and the advice turned around.

The bowl stayed

What did not fade was the bowl. Wood suits salad: a large bowl turned from one piece is light for its size, and it does not ring when the servers hit the side.

Wooden bowls are still made in American workshops with long histories. The Bowl Mill in Granville, Vermont, has made hardwood bowls since 1857 and today sells one-piece, hand-turned bowls in maple, beech, cherry and walnut. A bowl like that, cared for, can stay in a family for decades.

It belongs to the same lineage as the other wooden things that never left the kitchen. Treenware traces that older tradition of turned and carved household wood, and the dough bowl tells the story of the salad bowl’s larger, plainer cousin.

How to care for one now

The modern rule is the opposite of Rector’s, and it is simple. The Bowl Mill’s care instructions are a good model:

  • Wash it. Use a cloth or a non-abrasive pad and warm, sudsy water, and scrub until the food is gone.
  • Do not soak it in water.
  • Keep it out of the dishwasher.
  • Dry it right away with a clean cloth or paper towel.
  • Oil it when it looks dry or feels rough. The mill recommends mineral oil and advises against vegetable oils as a finish, since they can turn gummy.

None of this rules out garlic. If you like the flavor, rub a cut clove around the inside of the bowl before tossing the salad, as cooks have done for two centuries. Then wash the bowl when dinner is over.

What the old rule got right

Rector was wrong about washing, but he was right that a wooden bowl changes with use. Its color deepens. Its surface softens under the servers. It becomes, over years, a particular bowl rather than a product.

That is the quiet case for wood in any kitchen. It asks for a little care, and in return it records the meals made with it. A clean, oiled salad bowl does that without the smell. It is the same lesson the wooden spoon teaches: use it, wash it, oil it and keep it.

The short version

From the 1940s to the 1960s, American cookbooks promoted the wooden salad bowl, and George Rector’s 1936 Saturday Evening Post column spread the idea that it should be rubbed with garlic, oiled and never washed. Critics pointed out that the unwashed oil went rancid, and the fashion faded. The bowl stayed. Wash it by hand in warm, soapy water, dry it at once, keep it out of the dishwasher and oil it with mineral oil when it looks dry.

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