This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
Crisp, fresh and satisfying, Caesar salad is a dish that’s conquered dining outlets the world over, from your neighbourhood bistro and Pret A Manger to Michelin-starred marvels like Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles. While mayonnaise-heavy iterations haunt room-service menus in hotels far and wide, Caesar salad purists live and breathe its original recipe: whole romaine lettuce leaves, crunchy garlic croutons tossed in a tangy, raw-egg-based dressing of minced anchovies and garlic, dijon mustard, lemon, salt and pepper, topped with shaved parmesan.
This punchy salad’s basic, accessible ingredients mean it’s a fabulously flexible dish, easy to spruce up, adding extras to the core ingredients. That’s maybe why, in 1953, the Paris-based International Society of Epicures hailed the recipe as ‘the greatest to originate in the Americas in 50 years’ and why it hasn’t fallen off the restaurant radar in its 101 years of existence.
Take LA’s Bar Etoile, where the salad is transformed into a mighty beef tartare hybrid. Thick slices of toasted bread are layered with the dressing and raw beef mixed with speckles of anchovy plus freshly grated lemon zest and parmesan. But if you’re a Caesar purist, you might want to instead sample the original at Quebec’s Le Continental, complete with the spectacle of it being put together tableside.
The original recipe of Caesar salad consists of whole romaine lettuce leaves and garlic croutons tossed in a dressing of egg yolks, anchovies, garlic, dijon mustard, lemon, salt and pepper, topped with shaved parmesan. Photography by Lisovskaya Natalia, Getty Images
Origin
The Caesar salad was born in 1924 in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, where Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini had opened Restaurante Caesar's to attract US visitors craving an escape from the prohibition laws. The story goes that on a bustling Fourth of July, the restaurant was running short on menu items, so Caesar snatched up the leftover ingredients, rolled them out in a dining cart in the presence of drunk, hunger-stricken Americans, and prepared an improvised salad with a theatrical flourish, tableside, distracting them from the random ingredients. It was an unexpected success.
Word spread to the US, then across the world. Silver-screen celebrities including Clark Gable and Jean Harlow flocked to the border town to try it. When legendary 1960s US food broadcaster Julia Child made a pilgrimage, she called the dish “a sensation of a salad from coast to coast”.
While Caesar is credited with inventing the dish, some historians credit his brother, Alex Cardini, with creating the definitive version. They say it was he who added anchovies and dijon mustard to the dressing of the original recipe — ingredients still used in the salad to this day. Livio Santini, a cook at Caesar’s restaurant, also threw his name in the ring, claiming that the original recipe was his mother’s.
The world may never know the true inventor, but historians do agree it’s a Tijuana creation. Visit Caesar’s today, and you’ll find a portrait of Cardini hung on the wall opposite Santini's, commemorating the salad’s legacy.
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