Chicken Caesar Salad - 152

Did you know that the Caesar Salad was invented in Mexico? Tijuana, to be exact.

After weeks and weeks of soups, casseroles, grilled meats, and platos calientes, I decided that I needed to eat a salad as a main course. We also have a good recipe for a Caesar salad dressing that calls for queso cotija, cilantro, pepitas y chiles poblanos. The recipe we have makes a lot of dressing, so when we're not having salad, it makes a great dip for vegetables, too.

CHICKEN CAESAR SALAD is really just a romaine lettuce salad with some cooked chicken on it. It's really the dressing that makes the meal. As you can see from the picture, we also added some thinly sliced red onion and jalapeños to our romaine lettuce and cooked chicken salad. (We are still creating dinners out of what we find in the refrigerator). What you don't see - and what we added at the last minute before tossing the salad - were some of the baked tortilla strips we'd made the previous night for the Sopa de Tortilla. We tossed them into the salad to give it some crunch.

Salads always seem better in the summer, but last night's was a real treat. We both heaped tons of salad onto our plates and enjoyed something we hadn't made since last September!

Here is the history of the Caesar salad:

1924 - Most historians believe that Caesar salad honors restaurateur Caesar Cardini (1896-1956), who invented it in Tijuana, Mexico in 1924 on the Fourth of July weekend. It is said that on this busy weekend, Cardini was running low on food and he put together a salad for his guests from what was left over in the kitchen. His original recipe included romaine, garlic, croutons, and Parmesan cheese, boiled eggs, olive oil and Worcestershire sauce. The original salad was prepared at tableside. When the salad dressing was ready, the romaine leaves were coated with the dressing and placed stem side out, in a circle and served on a flat dinner plate, so that the salad could be eaten with the fingers.

In 1926, Alex Cardini joined his brother, Caesar, at the Tijuana restaurant. Alex, an ace pilot in the Italian Air Force during World War I, added other ingredients, one of which was anchovies, and named the salad Aviator's Salad" in honor of the pilots from Rockwell Field Air Base in San Diego. It is reported that Alex's version became very popular, and later this salad was renamed "Caesar Salad." Caesar was said to be staunchly against the inclusion of anchovies in this mixture, contending that the Worcestershire sauce was what actually provided that faint fishy flavor. He also decreed that only Italian olive oil and imported Parmesan cheese be used in the dressing.

Over the years, it became quite the thing to do - to drive to Tijuana for a Caesar Salad. Californians, including Hollywood celebrities such as Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and W.C. fields dined at Caesar's to escape the Prohibition laws in the U.S. In Europe, Caesar's Salad was also appearing in restaurants. Julia Child, famous cookbook author, wrote about Caesar Salad in her cookbook From Julia Child's Kitchen:

One of my early remembrances of restaurant life was going to Tijuana in 1925 or 1926 with my parents, who were wildly excited that they should finally lunch at Caesar's restaurant. Tijuana, just south of the Mexican border from San Diego, was flourishing then, in the prohibition era. . . Words spread about Tijuana and the good life, and about Caesar Cardini's restaurant, and about Caesar's salad.

My parents, of course, ordered the salad. Caesar himself rolled the big cart up to the table, tossed the romaine in a great wooden bowl, and I wish I could say I remembered his every move, but I don't. They only thing I see again clearly is the eggs. I can see him break 2 eggs over that romaine and roll them in, the greens going all creamy as the eggs flowed over them. Two eggs in a salad? Two one-minute coddled eggs? And garlic-flavored croutons, and grated Parmesan cheese? It was a sensation of a salad from coast to coast, and there were even rumblings of its success in Europe.

http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/SaladHistory.htm