The Caesar’s Origins and Its Rise to Popularity
Though it can’t be traced back to the Roman Empire, the Caesar salad has unmistakably international origins: the creation of an Italian immigrant business catering to American tourists in a Mexican border town. Most historians have traced the salad to the brothers Cesare (Cesar) and Alessandro (Alex) Cardini, immigrants from Baveno, Italy, who opened restaurants in Sacramento, San Diego, and Tijuana in the early 1920s. Their investments paid off during Prohibition, as restrictions on alcohol consumption led Californians to make the 30-minute drive over the border to Tijuana in search of gambling, entertainment, and gourmet eats.
As the film industry grew throughout the 1930s, so did the tourist industry in Tijuana, and Caesar’s Place, the brothers’ restaurant on Avenida Revolución, became a destination for studio insiders. Cesar, who was the chef, developed his signature salad—long pieces of crisp romaine lettuce, drizzled with a French-style dressing of Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, and a raw or barely cooked egg, whisked together in a bowl and finished with a shower of grated Parmesan and garlic croutons—that was prepared tableside, a flourish that delighted customers and canonized the dish. Those same studio insiders traveled back to Los Angeles and raved about the dish, helping it gain popularity in the city and across California.
The growing availability of good olive oil, imported Parmesan, and canned anchovies in the 1920s helped boost the spread of Caesar salad imitations, among home cooks, including Italian immigrants who depended on the imported ingredients for a taste of home. The addition of anchovies was not Cesar’s idea—he felt that the ingredient’s flavor was too strong, and preferred to use Worcestershire sauce for its hint of fishy richness—but it first appeared in versions of the recipe published in the 1930s, likely added as a substitution by chefs creating variations of the dish across Southern California. The salad as most of us know it today incorporates salt- or oil-packed anchovies that are often rinsed to remove excess salt, then finely chopped into a paste and incorporated into the dressing or scattered over the finished salad with the cheese and croutons. But many chefs choose to abandon anchovies altogether, as Julia Child did in her version of the recipe in the 1970s.