Caesar Salad, as featured in America the Cookbook

Meals that made America great - Caesar Salad

How food from around the world found a welcome home in the US - as featured in America The Cookbook

Despite its renowned enthusiasm for food consumption, it's an easy and traditional habit to regard America as the less-impressive cousin of the global culinary family. However, the stories of America's dishes as told in our title America The Cookbook reflect two of the finest aspects of its character – immigration and improvisation. The Caesar salad is a case in point.

The dish is attributed to Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant and restaurateur who was living in Tijuana, just south of the US border, to evade the impact of the Prohibition era. According to his daughter, Cardini created the dish with ingredients he had left following a rush on the Fourth of July celebrations of 1924. Initially popular in Mexico, it soon crossed over to Southern California and acquired an all-American cachet.

 

America The Cookbook
America The Cookbook

The recipe for the salad here includes the standard romaine lettuce and croutons dressed with parmesan cheese, lemon juice, olive oil, egg, Worcestershire sauce, garlic black pepper – but also anchovies, an element introduced some time in the 1940s in New York, as noted approvingly by the newspaper journalist Dorothy Kilgallen following a visit to Gilmore's Steak House.

To get the recipe, and for more on American food - both homegrown and imported - get America The Cookbook here.