CAESAR SALAD
It’s Fourth of July, 1924, in Tijuana. Caesar Cardini, an
Italian-Mexican restaurateur who recently left San Diego
to run his eponymous restaurant south of the border,
where Prohibition laws haven’t stemmed the flow of
booze-related revenue, is under pressure from a crazy
holiday-related rush on the restaurant. The hungry
patrons have wiped out his larder, so, the story goes,
Caesar is forced to invent a dish on the spot based on the
ingredients he has on hand. He decides to serve simple
leaves of Romaine lettuce tossed with croutons in a
dressing made tableside with egg yolks, Worcestershire
sauce, olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, and Parmesan cheese.
The dish is a hit, and history is made.
While this account may contain much that is
apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, my question is
this: why is it that all of these semimythical food-origin
stories—burgers, Caesar salad, Buffalo wings—have to
involve sort some shot-in-the-dark form of recipe
development akin to winning the lottery? For once,
couldn’t we have a great dish that was created through
years of hard research and perfection? Whatever
happened to the American dream, the hard work and the
payoff at the end?
Suffice it to say, the dish was in fact invented in Mexico,
and it was not named after a Roman emperor as I’d
always thought growing up. And there’s no denying that
it’s an awesome salad, packed with savory umami notes