Caesar salad's monumental moment
This time around, it comes with an identity crisis. Our payoff: two recipes, one classic, one extreme. Plus new perks for paid subscribers!
Happy Friday, nostalgic cook!
A story published on Wednesday in Eater — “Which Caesar Salad is Worth Hailing?” — confirms it: The classic dish is having a major moment. Is it because it's celebrating its hundredth birthday this year, having been created in 1924 at Caesar Cardini’s Caesar’s Palace in Tijuana? Or is it because the Caesar Salad is one of the greatest dishes ever — which it most definitely is.
Whatever the reason, Caesar Salad is all over the place — seemingly in every restaurant, as the trade publication Restaurant Business noted in April, and in all kinds of publications, with recipes and without.
In January, the L.A. Times published (behind paywalls) two Caesar stories — one revisiting its birthplace, the other rounding up the best in L.A., and way beyond.
As both that roundup and the Restaurant Business story notes, these days chefs and others are spinning the Caesar pretty wildly, which has made Atlantic staff writer Ellen Cushing hopping mad. “We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud,” she wrote in a story last month — “Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads. (Again, paywalled — I was so eager to read it, I sprung for a free 1-month trial subscription, which I’ll probably love and wind up paying for.) She continued:
“Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce.”
Did I mind that the Broccoli Chicory Caesar I had 10 days ago at Antico Nuovo in L.A. was romaine-free? Not one tiny bit. But I do not want yogurt or lemongrass in my Caesar — and definitely not half-and-half.
Half-and-half? Yep. Let me explain — at the risk of having you get hopping mad as well.