Deja Vu

All Hail Caesar

Tags:

agriculture,

environment,

food,

Hollywood,

lunch

2010: Romaine is on the march! From a nearly forgotten lettuce variety grown on few acres, the crunchy green now covers nearly 80,000 acres of America, the Los Angeles Times article reports this week. What happened? A new Caesar salad came to power.

Then, all of a sudden, in the late 1970s [Caesar salad] was "discovered" by the fast food industry, often topped with very untraditional grilled chicken, and there followed a couple of decades of extremely heady popularity.

From almost nothing, by the mid '90s, more than 16,000 acres of romaine was being grown. By 2000 that had increased to more than 60,000 acres and today it stands at more than 80,000.

That's still about half of iceberg's acreage, but especially considering the high percentage of iceberg that winds up on top of hamburgers, it's pretty impressive.

1949: Long before the garlicky, creamy sensation came to dominate McDonald's and strip mall steakhouses, it led a more glamorous life. Caesar salad was the hipster green option of choice in southern California — the golden beet salad with goat cheese of 1940s Tinseltown. The salad's popularity caught the notice of the Associated Press' Bob Thomas in 1949.

Want to know about Hollywood's favorite dish? And I don't mean Betty Grable.

I'm speaking of the Caesar Salad, also known by Dicicco, California, Golden West, and other aliases. It's safe to say that it is the most ordered dish in any of filmtown's swank restaurants. Origin of the salad is obscure. Some say it was born in an eatery named Caesar's in Tijuana, Mexico. At any rate, it has taken the classy cafes by storm. It is usually mixed at the table with a grace exhibited by Jules Munshin as the head waiter in Easter Parade.

Actually, any fool can make a Caesar. I do it often. Many husbands make a ritual of whipping up the salad, even those who can't boil an egg without burning it. It brings out the ham in a man.

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