There are times such as these, temperatures high and energy low, that I become excited about salad. In periods of my life in which I’m trying to be healthy, I’m almost reliant on the dish.
A well-made salad is a refreshing interlude, whether prepared and positioned in Tupperware to be extracted from an office fridge or created at home using whatever might be lying around; salads require effort and thought but don’t ever seem to take much longer than 15 minutes to put together.
One of the most famous is the Caesar, which today appears on restaurant menus the world over. This year marks 100 years of the dish, invented in a Mexican hotel by an Italian immigrant. It was in 1924 or thereabouts that Caesar Cardini was credited with first crafting a theatrical dish to be prepared tableside by skilled waiting staff. These salads were designed to be enjoyed with martinis while customers waited for steaks to cook – those devoured by the thousands of wealthy Americans, many of them celebrities, even mobsters who shot over the border into Tijuana to party at Caesar’s hotel free of the laws of prohibition.
Since then, the Caesar salad has been messed about with, altered, tweaked; often it loses its way. Still, much the same as the club sandwich, another happy product of an upscale hotel with a workforce seeking only to soothe monied guests, the salad is a celebrated and famous force and one that holds so much weight its imitation extends beyond kitchens.
I am talking about pre-bottled dressings. Cardini himself sold up after a ten-year run and moved to Los Angeles to bottle what was already a popular condiment, or sauce for salads. He stayed relatively true to what is considered to have become the correct recipe (the very first didn’t contain anchovies, while the latest iteration at the hotel, still running after tumultuous times, now calls for lime over lemon, being Mexico). You can still buy Cardini’s version today.
A good Caesar dressing is a mixture of extra virgin olive oil, garlic, egg yolks, anchovy paste, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce and parmesan. This should be blended in a bowl before romaine lettuce and croutons are added. Additional shavings of parmesan would not be out of place, nor a heavy grind of pepper.
I had a Caesar salad much the same as this at the Golden Steer Steakhouse in Las Vegas not so long ago. It was performed and delivered as intended and preceded buttery lobster, prime USDA steak and French fries.
But I don’t really think Caesar salad is all that worthwhile on its own. Even in intense heat, it doesn’t really do it for me as a standalone dish because it lacks oomph. To add chicken – the most common manoeuvre – is blasphemous to some. It’s fair to say the salad ceases to become what it is. I’ve seen all manner of varieties and none of them are a true “Caesar salad”, per se.
What must be acknowledged together with all this is the sauce. It is powerful. And it works with ingredients other than those prescribed by Italian decree. And it is here I must also freely admit my love of Pizza Express’ version, a bottle almost always in my fridge in salad season. My adoption of it probably stems from the fact that my mum worked at Pizza Express for many years and would bring bottles back for the dipping of pizza crusts.
More to the point, I cannot always be bothered to open tins of anchovy paste, squeeze lemons and grate parmesan; often I want only to chop some leaves, a few vegetables and a tomato or two and pour generously on to it an amount of pre-made dressing. Lunch in minutes.
My salads vary. Usually, they contain a tender collection of leaves, herbs – parsley, chives – tomatoes, cucumber, celery, grated carrot, even a handful of grated cheddar, if not cubes.
And yes, I’ve been known to slice cooked chicken from a roast earlier in the week and scatter it carelessly throughout. This with a fresh wedge of sourdough bread makes for a glorious lunch and I owe many thanks to Pizza Express’ simplistic, easy, careless version of a century-old dressing, one fiercely guarded and prized but which will – in all manner of uncouth forms – save any summer lunch from undress.
