A star was born.
Tijuana plans to commemorate the anniversary this month with a three-day food and wine festival, and the unveiling of a statue of Cardini.
Caesar’s – an elegant restaurant Cardini opened in Tijuana a few years after the salad was born – says it still makes as many as 300 Caesar salads each day.
Unlike some other menu items from the early 20th century – think creamed liver loaf or aspic – Caesar salad remains a perennial favourite.
It satisfies us in many hedonistic ways, while we can still feel virtuous. It is, after all, a salad
Beth Forrest, a professor of liberal arts and applied food studies at the Culinary Institute of America, said it took a few years for Caesar salad to hit the mainstream.
A recipe for it did not make Joy of Cooking, one of the most popular American cookbooks, until the 1951 edition.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Caesar salad was often prepared tableside, giving it an air of spectacle and sophistication, she said.
Forrest said Caesar salad is ideal for the Western palate because it contains our two preferred textures: crispy and creamy. The egg yolks and Parmesan cheese are also high in glutamate acids, which give the salad the rich, salty taste known as umami.
“It satisfies us in many hedonistic ways, while we can still feel virtuous. It is, after all, a salad,” Forrest said.
At Beatrix, a chain of five restaurants in the Chicago that makes healthier versions of comfort foods, chef and partner Andrew Ashmore spreads a spoonful of yogurt-based dressing at the bottom of the salad bowl and mixes it with capers, parsley, lemon vinaigrette and champagne vinegar before adding little gem lettuce, baby arugula, breadcrumbs and a generous shaving of Grana Padano cheese.
“It is our number one selling salad, and it has been since we opened 11 years ago,” Ashmore said. “I couldn’t try to take it off the menu if I wanted to.”
Cardini was not inclined to vary his recipe. In a 1987 interview with Hawaiian daily newspaper Honolulu Star-Bulletin, his daughter Rosa Cardini said her father was very precise in preparing his creation.
He used only the tender, inner leaves of Romaine lettuce and left them whole, intending diners to pick them up with their fingers. He boiled the eggs for one minute before adding them and he did not use anchovies.
There is some debate about the origins of the salad. Some claim the recipe was actually from the mother of Livio Santini, one of Cardini’s chefs and a fellow Italian immigrant.
Others say Cardini’s brother Alex was the originator of the salad, which he made with limes and anchovy paste. Alex’s version was dubbed “Aviator’s Salad” because he supposedly served it to airmen from a base in San Diego, California.
Forrest said the recipe also echoes old Italian specialities. It resembles a pinzimonio, a dressing of olive oil and lemon juice used as a vegetable dip, or a bagna cauda, a hot dip of anchovy and garlic from the Piedmont region in Italy where Cardini was born.
Caesar’s in Tijuana did not respond when asked about the salad’s history, but the restaurant does mention Santini’s name on its website.
Business in Tijuana declined after Prohibition ended, so Caesar Cardini moved his family to Los Angeles in 1935. They bottled their Caesar dressing at home before eventually founding Caesar Cardini Foods.
Rosa Cardini took over the family company in 1956 after her father’s death, eventually adding 17 other dressings. T. Marzetti, a maker of dressings and dips, acquired Cardini Foods in 1996 and still sells Caesar Cardini’s brand dressings.
