In cooking school we learned that there are two kinds of salads, simple and composed.
Simple salads consist of a single ingredient, like lettuce, with a basic sauce.
Hearts of iceberg with Green Goddess dressing. But sometime in my early teens my parents discovered a salad bar at some local eatery. From that day on we had selections of things like croutons, bacon bits, and green pepper slivers, tossed with our choice of the same three dressings. On picnics we had salads that didn't involve green vegetables - potato salad, macaroni salad, chicken, or tuna salad. Nothing like mayo in the hot sun.