The Word - Vol 76

Who Made the Salad….Caesar!

I was browsing through the website Atlas Obscura the other day and came upon a story about the original recipe for Caesar salad, and where it originated. I’ll get to the salad, the recipe, and the inventor later, but what that story did was ignite memories of Hy’s Encore Restaurant on Hornby Street in downtown Vancouver.

I like to call it the Golden Years of Vancouver. Well, they were the Golden Years for me, the 60s into the early 70s. A time when The Cave Supper Club flourished with acts that were headed to Vegas. There was Isy’s on Georgia Street, and a list as long as your arm of nightclubs featuring everything from dinner and a show to musical acts, exotic dancers, and more. 

The one thing that was rare in early Vancouver was the stand-alone restaurant. There were plenty of coffee shops, diners, and drive-in burger joints, but if you wanted to go for a fancy dinner, you had to go to one of the big hotels. There just weren’t many upscale restaurants in those days, maybe half a dozen at most.

​The one I remember that was “thee” place to go was Hy’s Encore on Hornby. Now we’re talking upscale! When I finally got the chance to dine there, the experience was one I remember to this day. It was dark, with lots of dark wood and leather, candles, and waiters dressed to the nines. Hy’s was, and is known for its amazing steak dinners, but what the main event in my mind was the Caesar salad. The waiter would arrive at your table with a cart, a big wooden bowl, wooden salad tongs, and a mess of ingredients. The Caesar salad!  Start the show!

And it was a show, a real production, the egg, romaine lettuce, lemon juice, oil, and most shocking, anchovies! The tossing of the salad was all part of the magic that was the Hy’s Caesar salad. For me, that performance and that dish is right up there with my early memories of Bongo Bongo soup at Trader Vic’s, but that’s another story.

Who invented the Caesar salad and where? Well, who invented it isn’t exactly clear, it could have been one of the Cardini brothers, either Caesar or Alex, or Alex’s former business partner, or a movie producer and suspected mobster named Pat DiCicco, but where it was invented is clear, Tijuana Mexico! 

I’m going to go with Caesar Cardini as the inventor. According to his daughter, Rosa, the Caesar salad was created on July 4, 1924, at her father’s restaurant, Caesar’s Place on Callejón del Travieso in Tijuana. The restaurant was busy that hot Friday night and the kitchen was running low on some ingredients, so Caesar took stock, rolled up his sleeves, and began to experiment. 

He started with crisp, cool romaine lettuce. Then he coddled an egg, cooking it for just one minute to thicken the yolk, whisked the egg with freshly ground pepper, lemon juice, salt, Worcestershire sauce, garlic-infused olive oil, and parmigiano reggiano. Finally, he tossed the creamy dressing with the romaine leaves and sprinkled the creation with croutons. The whole production was a little bit of theater, a tradition that Hy’s would carry on. Caesar would come right to the table and toss the ingredients in the right order. You might find it surprising, but the original salad was meant to be eaten with your fingers! Please don’t carry on that tradition if you’re planning a night at Hy’s.

Celebrated cook, Julia Child experienced the making of the salad firsthand when she was a young teenager on a trip to Tijuana with her parents. As she remembers, “Caesar himself rolled the big cart up to the table and tossed the romaine in a great wooden bowl, it was a sensation of a salad! How could a mere salad cause such emotion?” Child went on to tell her readers to “use large rather slow and dramatic gestures for everything you do, as though you were Caesar himself.” Ingredients were added one at a time, punctuated with rolling tosses, the salad leaves tumbling “like a large wave breaking toward you.” Child recommended eight of these tosses; Rosa, however, disagreed with the famed chef on this point. Her father’s instructions were clear: “Toss no more than seven times.”

There have been several variations on the classic salad over the years, but the core of the recipe remains the same. These fast-paced days we live in call for the dressing in the bottle. Not quite the theatre you experience when the big wooden bowl is brought table-side!

So, if you decide to construct your own Caesar salad, and you’re doing it old style the way Caesar would have wanted, always remember, toss no more than seven times.

And please, don’t forget the Anchovies!

Till next week…
Wayne

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