"Salad days" is a Shakespearean idiom referring to a period of carefree innocence, idealism, and pleasure associated with youth. The modern use, chiefly in the United States, describes a heyday, when a person is/was at the peak of their abilities, while not necessarily a youth. History The phrase is attributed to William Shakespeare, who made the first known use of it in his 1606 play Antony and Cleopatra. In the speech at the end of Act One in which Cleopatra is regretting her youthful dalliances with Julius Caesar she says, "...My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/To say as I said then!" The phrase became popular only from the middle of the 19th century, coming to mean "a period of youthful inexperience or indiscretion." The metaphor comes from Cleopatra's use of the word 'green'—presumably meaning someone youthful, inexperienced, or immature. Her references to "green" and "cold" both suggest qualities of salads. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage summarizes several other possible meanings of the metaphor: "Whether the point is that youth, like salad, is raw, or that salad is highly flavoured and youth loves high flavours, or that innocent herbs are youth's food as milk is babes' and meat is men's, few of those who use the phrase could perhaps tell us; if so, it is fitter for parrots' than for human speech." Usage Queen Elizabeth II used the phrase during her Silver Jubilee royal address in 1977, referring to her vow to God and her people when she made her 51st birthday broadcast: "Although that vow was made in my salad days, when I was green in judgment, I do not regret nor retract one word of it." The phrase has been used as the title of several books, including novels by Theodora Benson, Françoise Sagan, and Charles Romalotti; Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s autobiography The Salad Days; and numerous cookbooks. Paul Greenberg in "Tuna's End", his 2010 The New York Times Magazine article wrote: "Aboard one Zodiac, Frank Hewetson, a 20-year Greenpeace veteran who in his salad days as a protester scaled the first BP deepwater oil rigs off Scotland, tried to direct his pilot toward the net so that he could throw a daisy chain of sandbags over its floating edge and allow the bluefin to escape." In film, television, and modern theatre Salad Days is a British musical by Julian Slade and