Russell Norman’s cavolo nero Caesar salad
Cavolo nero Caesar salad with candied walnuts.
“It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have to announce that I ate kale and I liked it.”
— Greg Behrendt, comedian and writer
John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was an enthusiastic gambler and a terrible statesman. Many accounts suggest high levels of incompetence and corruption, leading to the proposed epitaph: “Seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished so little.” He often spent many hours at the gaming table and, rather than interrupt a card game, would famously instruct his servants to bring him his lunch between two pieces of bread. And so, the legend goes, the sandwich was born. Right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, as poetic and popular as this story is, it’s utter tosh. Sandwiches have existed for at least 2,000 years and there are documented examples from the cuisine of so many different cultures that it is a preposterous fallacy to pin its creation on old Monty over a high-stakes game of vingt-et-un in the 1770s.
Food myths like this persist because
we want them to be true. Marco Polo brought noodles back to Italy from China and so spaghetti was born? Nonsense.
The modern pizza was invented in New York at the end of the 19th century? Balderdash. The best way to cure a hangover is to down a couple of Bloody Marys? Poppycock.
But the Caesar salad, a cunning combination of lettuce, raw egg yolk, olive oil, anchovies, croutons and Parmesan cheese has an origin story that appears to be mostly true.
Caesar Cardini, an Italian émigré who owned and ran restaurants in America also had the good sense to open a hotel in Tijuana, just inside the Mexican border, where the restrictions of Prohibition did not apply. One particularly busy weekend during the 4 July celebrations of 1924, 30 Americans swamped the hotel and Cardini began to run out of booze and food. Tequila was easy enough to replenish but food less so. In a classic example of necessity being the mother of invention, he combined a few ingredients that he wasn’t running low on and called it a Caesar salad. Furthermore, to ease the pressure on an overworked kitchen brigade, he had the waiters make the dish tableside. And so a legend was created.
This variation on the Caesar first appeared at the Soho restaurant Polpetto using black kale (cavolo nero) instead of lettuce. Kale is one of those Marmite ingredients you either love or hate, but cavolo nero is the friendliest of the kale family and I’ve added a further twist by replacing the croutons with candied walnuts. The principle is the same — adding an essential crunch — and the result sweeter and a tad more Christmassy.