Caesar Cardini, who operated a restaurant/hotel
in Tijuana Mexico tossed the
first Caesar's salad on the evening of
July 4, 1924.
The Paris-based International Society of
Epicures, in the 1950s, called the
Caesar Salad, the 'greatest recipe
to originate from the America's in 50 years.'
Caesar was born near Lago Maggiore, Italy, in 1896, and migrated to the US with his brother Alex, after WWI, when they served as Aviators in the Italian Air Force.
An interesting side note: In the late 1990's,
Caesar salads were made illegal in California, by a new health law banning
the sale of any food that used raw eggs as an ingredient. Presumably there
was a black market for the contraband salad.
The law was soon revised and the situation
remedied in 1998.
=====================================================
Rosa Maria Cardini,
75; Patented Her Father's Caesar Salad Dressing
Los Angeles Times
By Mary Rourke
Times Staff Writer
September 14, 2003
Rosa Maria Cardini, who with her father, Caesar, turned their recipe for Caesar salad into a multimillion-dollar business, died Sept. 3 at Grossmont Hospital in San Diego. She was 75 and had been hospitalized with kidney failure
Born in San Diego in 1928, Cardini was 10 when her father moved the family to Los Angeles. She soon began to work with him, bottling his Caesar salad dressing at home, labeling it by hand and selling it from the family station wagon at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles.
Some of his customers remembered Cardini and his salad dressing from when he owned Caesar's Hotel, a restaurant in Tijuana in the 1920s. Californians, including Hollywood celebrities Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, dined at Caesar's to escape the Prohibition laws in the U.S.
(Agua Caliente, the racetrack where Seabiscuit, the rags-to-riches thoroughbred, ran in his early days, was another Tijuana attraction.)
By the 1940s, Cardini was bottling his salad dressing and distributing it in a number of U.S. cities. By 1953, the Caesar salad had gained a reputation in Europe, and the International Society of Epicures, a group of professional chefs based in Paris, proclaimed it "the greatest recipe to originate from the Americas in 50 years."
Legends persist concerning the salad's original recipe or even what the recipe includes, exactly.
Most credit Cardini with the classic version, but others say it was a Chicago-based chef, Giacomo Junia.
And whether there were anchovies, croutons, eggs (raw or coddled) or dashes of Worcestershire sauce depends on whom you ask.
Junia created his version with all of the above ingredients. He named the results after the Emperor Julius Caesar.
Those in the Cardini camp say he developed the authentic Caesar, based on a recipe that an employee at Caesar's Hotel brought with him from his Italian mother's kitchen. The dressing included olive oil, a coddled egg, garlic and Parmesan cheese, served on romaine lettuce.
Cardini added lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and croutons to the mix.
After her father's death in 1956, Rosa Maria Cardini took charge of the family business, Caesar Cardini Foods Inc., based in Culver City. She patented the Caesar salad dressing and added 17 other kinds of dressings, including several for health-conscious eaters.
Even after she sold the business to Dolefan Corp., an Arlington Heights, Ill, manufacturing firm, in 1988, she remained an advocate of her father's Caesar recipe, refusing additions to the salad, particularly anchovies.
At a Super Bowl weekend celebration at Agua Caliente in Tijuana in 1988, Cardini mixed a "super Caesar" salad for 3,000 people in a specially constructed salad bowl that was 14 feet long.
In an interview about the project with Business Wire, Cardini described her challenge.
"We hope to make it and be serving it in 15 minutes," she said of the salad that is typically mixed, tableside, for each customer. "You can't let it sit, or you don't get a good salad."
Cardini never married and had no children. When she retired, she made San Diego her full-time home. One of her projects was to raise funds for the Mount Laguna Fire Department in San Diego County.
Memorial donations may be made to the Mount Laguna Fire Department, P.O. Box 51, Mount Laguna, CA 91948.
Rosa
Maria Cardini, 75; Patented Her Father's Caesar Salad Dressing
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/
la-me-cardini14sep14,1,2326119.story?coll=la-news-obituaries
==================================================
This is reprinted
from an article by
Jim Rader , Merriam-Webster
Inc.
American Food Folklore
and Culinary History:
The standard "Caesar salad" legend credits the creation of the recipe to an Italian immigrant, Caesar Cardini, who operated a restaurant (or hotel and restaurant in some versions) in Tijuana. According to the canonical version, told by Caesar's daughter Rosa, he tossed the first Caesar's salad on the evening of July 4, 1924.
The most detail I've been able to find on the supposed background of Caesar Cardini is in articles in the "Tulsa World" (July 9, 1997) by Rik Espinosa (whom I've also spoken to by phone), in "The Santa Fe New Mexican" (May 28, 1997) by Alan C. Taylor, and in the "Chicago Tribune" (July 23, 1987) by Peter Kump.
Caesar was born near Lago Maggiore, Italy, in 1896; he and his brother Alex emigrated to the U.S. after World War I. The Cardini's lived in San Diego but operated a restaurant in Tijuana to circumvent Prohibition.
The canonical version claims that the restaurant was frequented by Hollywood stars such as Clarke Gable, Jean Harlow, and W.C. Fields; if this was ever the case, it isn't relevant to 1924, when Gable was a young unknown, Fields was still in vaudeville, and Jean Harlow was 13 years old. The only person who actually claims to have dined at the restaurant is Julia Child, who, according to Paul Kump, said she was brought there by her parents and ate the salad at its source.
After the repeal of Prohibition (1934) and the outlawing of casino gambling in Mexico (1935), the Cardini's sold the Tijuana restaurant and moved to the Los Angeles area. The restaurant still exists in Tijuana, though it has changed location a number of times.
In L.A. , the Cardini's are supposed to have sold a homemade version of their salad dressing from a store. In 1948, Caesar and Rosa began to commercially bottle the dressing, though because "Caesar salad" was in the public domain--which suggests it was pretty well-known--they could trademark only "Original Caesar's" and "Cardini".
Rik Espinosa reports "Rosa told me that in 1953, the Paris-based International Society of Epicures called the Caesar's Salad [sic] the 'greatest recipe to originate from the America's in 50 years.'" (Allan C. Taylor gives as a source for the same information a public relations firm for the dressing manufacturer.) Caesar Cardini died in 1956.
There are also a number of non-canonical versions of the Cardini legend: according to Rik Espinosa, Paul Maggiora, a partner of the Cardini's, claimed to have tossed the first Caesar's salad in 1927 for American airmen from San Diego and called it "Aviator's Salad." (Maggiore and the two Cardini's were all veterans of the Italian air force during WWI.)...
Neal Matthews ("San Diego Union-Tribune", March 2, 1995) quotes one Livio Santini, an elderly resident of Tijuana, who claims he made the salad, from a recipe of his mother, in the kitchen of Caesar's restaurant when he was 18 years old, in 1925...
A totally heterodox origin for "Caesar salad" appears in the 3rd edition of "Webster's New World": "so named in honor of (Gaius) Julius Caesar by Giacomo Junia, Italian-American chef in Chicago, who invented it...while employed by Caesar Cardini...
The
History of Caesar Salad, The Kitchen Project - "Food History"
http://www.kitchenproject.com/history/CaesarSalad.htm
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Julius
had nothing to do with this salad | csmonitor.com
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0515/p20s01-lifo.html
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Caesar
Salad
http://members.cox.net/jjschnebel/caesrsal.html
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