Caesar Salad

[ackimzey]

....Just had to share this with the forum. A story in today's Houston Chronicle attributes the invention of the "Caesar Salad" to a WWI Italian pilot. What do y'all think?

Ann

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/food/6647816.html

[stevem49]

Yep. Julius Caeser He piloted a boat to Britain and other places.

[SiegeGunner]

It sounds perfectly plausible, and he was also a Cardini, so the origins of the Caesar are still pretty certain, compared, say, to the salade niçoise.

[centurion]

Couldn't get the link to open. Suspect the pilot was a guy called Pontious.

[ackimzey]

here's the part of the article that caught my eye (sorry the link didn't work)...

.....from today's Houston Chronicle...

"But even the "original" might very well be a variation on itself. Most food histories credit the salad to Caesar Cardini (circa early 1920s), a restaurateur in Tijuana, Mexico. Other food histories say the Caesar was invented in about 1903 by Giacomo Junia, an Italian-American cook in Chicago.

But it was Alex Cardini, Caesar’s brother, who created the salad, said Roberto Cardini, the son of Alex Cardini. The Friendswood [Texas] resident said that his father devised what is now known as the Caesar salad around 1926; in those days it was known as the "Aviator’s Salad" as a tribute to pilots in nearby San Diego, Cardini said.

Carla Cardini, Roberto Cardini’s daughter, has explained it this way: "Alex Cardini, my grandfather, was a pilot for the Italian Air Force during World War I before he moved to Tijuana to join my great-uncle Caesar. Caesar’s Place, my great-uncle’s bar and restaurant, was very popular. After a long night of drinking and missing curfew, a group of Rockwell Field Air Force pilots woke up at Caesar’s, and what Alex made for them for breakfast that morning is what we know today as Caesar Salad."

The salad earned its name because people in Southern California, for whom driving to Tijuana was no big deal, would say, "Let’s go to Caesar’s and have that salad." "

Ann