Phronesis
No. 020Dish1924Cuisine & Food ·History ·Cities

Caesar salad was invented in Mexico

It has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. It was improvised in Tijuana in the 1920s by an Italian-American restaurateur named Caesar Cardini.

1 min read
Caesar salad in Milestones restaurant in Yaletown, downtown Vancouver BC Canada
Image: Geoff Peters from Vancouver, BC, CanadaCC BY 2.0Wikimedia Commons

During Prohibition (1920–1933), Americans crossed the border to drink legally. Tijuana boomed with bars, casinos and restaurants. Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who had run restaurants in San Diego, opened one there.

According to his daughter Rosa, on 4 July 1924 the restaurant was so busy that the kitchen ran low. Cardini assembled what he had, romaine lettuce, croutons, Parmesan, egg, lemon, olive oil and Worcestershire sauce, and made a show of tossing it at the table. The family says the original had no anchovies; their faint flavour came from the Worcestershire sauce.

Julia Child’s memory

The chef Julia Child wrote that her parents took her to Caesar’s restaurant as a child in the 1920s and that she remembered the salad being prepared at the table. It is one of the best pieces of early evidence for the story.

A naming lesson

The salad is named after Caesar Cardini, not Julius Caesar. A Mexican-invented, Italian-American, Prohibition-era dish with a Roman-sounding name is a good example of how tangled food history usually is.

Bring it up

“The Caesar salad is from Tijuana, invented by a man called Caesar, and Prohibition is part of the reason it exists.”

Follow the thread

  1. Same patternThe croissant is Austrian (sort of) A dish that isn’t from where you’d assume.
  2. RelatedThe Big Mac index Food travelling across borders, and what it tells us about economies and culture.
  3. Same patternFortune cookies are Japanese, by way of California A dish whose national label doesn’t match where it came from.

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