The Caesar salad was born 100 years ago, on July 4, 1924, in Tijuana, Mexico. Above, the grilled romaine Caesar salad at Boucherie, a restaurant in downtown New Orleans.
Randy Schmidt/Boucherie
hide caption
switch caption
Randy Schmidt/Boucherie
In celebration of its 100th anniversary, you can find countless versions of the Caesar salad being eaten across the United States. They’re prepared tableside in fancy restaurants, at the counters of fast casual salad chains, and served at McDonald’s with chicken breast and cherry tomatoes.
Chef Nathanial Zimet insists on boquerones in the grilled Caesar salads at his New Orleans restaurant Butchery. The marinated white Spanish anchovies, he says, are much better than the salted kind. Romaine spears, he adds, are immune to wilting from flames.
“It’s almost like it holds the crunch of it,” he says, as the bright green leaves curl and darken during a quick char. He arranges the lettuce on a platter, drizzles with the dressing (lemon, garlic, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco), then sprinkles generously with coarse basil croutons and coarse Parmesan shavings.
“Is it cold? No. Is it hot? No. Is it cooked? No. Is it charred? Absolutely.”
There aren't many classic dishes that can claim a specific birth date. But the Caesar salad was first created on July 4, 1924 in Tijuana, Mexico.
It's not a Mexican salad, says Jeffrey Pilcher, a culinary historian who studies Mexican food habits.
“This is an Italian salad,” says Pilcher. “Caesar Cardini, the inventor of the salad, was an Italian immigrant, and there were a lot of Italian immigrants in Mexico.”
Tijuana, rebuilt into a bustling frontier city by a mix of people including Mexicans, Chinese and North Americans, had no distinctive native cuisine in 1924, Pilcher says. During Prohibition, tourists flocked to the spas, bullfights and nightclubs, where they could sip perfectly legal cocktails.
Cardini’s original restaurant, on Avenida Revolución in downtown Tijuana, is still open. The original Caesar salad is still on the menu. Legend has it that on that fateful Fourth of July, the restaurant was overrun with revelers. They gobbled up everything except a few pantry staples: olive oil, Parmesan cheese, egg, Worcestershire sauce, and lettuce. Someone, perhaps Cardini or perhaps his brother, scraped the provisions into a large wooden bowl. The Caesar salad was a hit.
A vegan Caesar salad.
JM Hirsch/AP
hide caption
switch caption
JM Hirsch/AP
Over the years, the dish has evolved from what is now called a “classic Caesar salad” (recipe here from our friends at PBS Food) in what writer Ellen Cushing has derided as “unchecked Caesar salad fraud” in a very funny recent article in The Atlantic.
“In October,” she writes, “the culinary magazine will Delicious a placed list of “Caesar” recipes with variations using bacon, maple syrup, and celery; asparagus, fava beans, smoked trout, and dill; and tandoori shrimp, prosciutto, kale chips, and mung bean sprouts. The so-called Caesar at Kitchen Mouse Cafe in Los Angeles, includes “pickled carrot, radish and coriander seeds, garlic croutons, crispy oyster mushrooms, lemon dressing.”
But Nathanial Zimet believes that the Caesar salad will endure precisely because of these freedoms, not in spite of them. The Boucherie chef thinks the salad can be a showcase for innovation, while remaining rooted in ingenuity and creativity in the kitchen. It is, he says, a salad for today. Maybe even forever.
Edited for radio and web by Jennifer Vanasco.
