"I was heading to Tijuana to eat lunch at the restaurant that invented the Caesar salad... A 25-minute walk from the border, Caesar’s Restaurante-Bar has been located on Tijuana’s main drag since 1927.
As Cardini’s daughter, Rosa, famously recounted for decades until her
death in 2003, her father invented his namesake dish on 4 July 1924. As
legend has it, the restaurant was doing such brisk business on American
Independence Day that it was running short on ingredients. On a whim,
Cardini improvised a dish using romaine lettuce leaves, raw egg yolk,
Parmesan cheese and other leftovers – transforming the odd scraps into a
surprisingly delicious meal...
Throughout the 1920s, hordes of American film stars flocked to Tijuana
for Prohibition-banned booze, and word soon spread of Caesar’s eponymous
salad among Hollywood elite. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow travelled to
Tijuana to try Caesar’s crisp lettuce and richly dressed dish. And in
her book From Julia Child’s Kitchen, acclaimed American chef Julia Child
described one of her earliest restaurant memories as venturing to
Caesar’s with her parents from their California home in the 1920s and
watching Cardini prepare his creation at their table."
Read the
BBC source article about
how the salad is prepared at your table at Caesar's, and then note this:
"Whatever the true origins, as the salad moved north into the US, one of
its key ingredients changed. Today, most recipes call for a splash of
lemon juice, and not the fresh lime juice the ensaladero stirred into the dressing at my table... “The problem, as I see it, is that the word in Spanish for ‘lime’ is ‘limón’, which, of course, sounds an awful lot like ‘lemon’,” she wrote. To add to the confusion, the Spanish word for ‘lemon’ is also ‘limón’.
Carreño’s father happened to work at Caesar’s in the 1950s tossing
salads tableside, and as she pointed out, the original Caesar she ate as
a child was always made with small, green Mexican limes."
You learn something every day.
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