How the cold, crunchy, craveable salad inspired a consistent and nearly comical fixation

Americans generally agree on a few things: Heinz makes the best ketchup, Stanley Tucci is a national treasure, and Mariah Carey is the undisputed queen of Christmas. Above all, we hold one incontrovertible truth: the Caesar salad is always a good idea.

In July, the salad’s 100th birthday drew sloshy encomiums from all sides. In a unifying moment reminiscent of the optimism of the Obama years, the Caesar salad’s anniversary inspired heady think pieces and TikToks captioned “Happy Birthday to the ultimate girl dinner, Caesar Fucking Salad,” soundtracked with bald-eagle screeches.

The personification of the straightforward salad is perplexing, yet the allure of a Caesar is undeniable: crisp romaine lettuce lacquered with creamy dressing and topped with crunchy croutons. But how did the modest dish become so ubiquitous, the subject of unbridled obsession?

“America had no clear definition of a salad well into the 19th century,” says Laura Shapiro, food historian and author of Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Until then, “salad” could mean creamy lobster and chicken salads or mixed greens with a French-style vinaigrette. The 1920s and 1930s expanded the genre with congealed recipes featuring everything from crab to maraschino cherries suspended in gelatin, as well as a phallic monstrosity called the candlestick salad, comprising a banana inserted into a pineapple ring, crowned with a cherry and served atop lettuce. Marshmallows, corned beef, and baked beans studded salads. Still, salads were strictly side dishes, not full meals.

In 1924, Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini reportedly invented the Caesar salad at his eponymous restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, which was overrun with American tourists. Cardini’s recipe features romaine hearts with an emulsification of olive oil, anchovies, sharp Parmesan, lemon juice, an egg yolk, a minced garlic clove, and a daub each of Dijon mustard and Worcestershire sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper and finished with a torrent of croutons made from old bread. Soon, Prohibition-era tourists began flocking to Caesar’s for his secret sauce.

The Caesar meets you where you are, and it doesn’t call for a laundry list of ingredients.

The Garden Room in Los Angeles had the first known menu to feature Caesar salad stateside in 1946, and Romanoff’s and the Hollywood Brown Derby popularized it that decade. In 1952, West Coast Cook Book, authored by Helen Evans Brown, a friend of James Beard, included Caesar salad, calling it the “most talked of salad of the decade, perhaps of the century.” Shapiro says, “She really thinks that this is the American salad.”

Soon, Caesar’s meteoric rise inspired infinite mutations, fueled by shelf-stable Kraft Parmesan beginning in 1945. The New York Times first ran a recipe for the dish in January 1947, calling for “marinated but not waterlogged leaves,” and the Los Angeles Times ran another recipe later that same year. But how did the salad outshine its contemporaries and become a fixture of steakhouses, airports, salad chains, diners, and even gas stations?

The most obvious answer might be croutons, arguably the greatest thing to happen to bread since sliced bread. America has a unique relationship with crunch, and Caesar salad was likely our first mainstream introduction to oil-slicked, toasted bread paired with leafy greens. French’s Crispy Fried Onions got the country eating green beans, Shapiro noted, and potato chips added texture to casseroles. “Once you have something salty and crispy…that is going to have an instant appeal in America,” she says. “Without croutons, who knows what would have happened to the Caesar?”

Next, its creamy dressing places the dish among a handful of craveable salads. The high-octane flavors of Caesar dressing departed from the subtle mother sauces that previously dominated American cooking, capturing the nation’s palate with near-absurd fervor. Shapiro says, “You have in your mind that you’re having a light little salad, but in fact, you are having something quite rich.”

Growing up in Michigan, writer Ahmed Ali Akbar thought that a Caesar was any salad with Caesar dressing on it, rather than a distinct dish. To him, Caesar dressing felt like a spin-off of ranch, a condiment as beloved as ketchup. Steve Henson, a plumber turned cowboy, created ranch dressing in 1949 while trying to perfect his mayonnaise-based buttermilk dressing. Guests at Henson’s Santa Barbara mountain ranch slash country club recalled slathering the stuff on everything from steak to ice cream. By the mid-1950s, Henson and his wife, Gayle, began shipping their homemade condiment by mail, and Hidden Valley Ranch dressing was off to the races. Both dressings resemble a looser, seasoned mayonnaise, one soured with milk and the other with lemon, and the anchovy-averse even swap Caesar dressing for ranch spiked with Worcestershire sometimes. Sam Stone, a staff writer at Bon Appétit, is one of those sitting out the fishiness. “My family was huge on the Cardini’s-brand Caesar dressing (made without anchovies) for our salads on spaghetti-and-meatball nights.”

But surely we have more interesting salads now, and so the Caesar renaissance is more than just about nostalgia or familiarity. Perhaps it helps that the proverbial recipe has varied little, anchovies notwithstanding. Even if other dishes are hit-or-miss at a trendy new restaurant, it’s difficult to botch a Caesar salad since its base and dressing rarely fray from the standard framework. Its approachability supercharged the salad’s staying power, and its recognizability positioned it as an effective litmus test for a good cook in America. Mohar Chaudhuri, a stylist and vice president of social intelligence at Edelman Data & Intelligence, says that she often rates restaurants by their Caesar salad alone. “If it doesn’t reach a very specific zesty-to-umami ratio, then all the other dishes suddenly fall flat,” she says.

The Cobb salad, another American sweetheart invented in 1937, is comparatively fussy and more time-consuming to prepare, owing to bacon and hard-boiled eggs. The chopped salad, the brainchild of LA restaurateur Jean Leon in the 1950s, features a free-for-all recipe, where anything goes so long as it’s cut into uniform bits. In 2024, the TikTok revival of the chopped salad includes fever-dream-like renditions inspired by elotes, breakfast sandwiches, and Italian hoagies. But the Caesar meets you where you are, and it doesn’t call for a laundry list of ingredients.

“It’s ultra-fascinating how the Caesar is everywhere, but I bet that a plurality of Americans could not name anchovies as the main ingredient.”

Still, as strips of grilled and fried chicken found their way into the dish, virtually every other protein followed and bolstered Caesar’s absolute rule. Zoya Biglary, the founder of plant-based fish company Fysh Foods, says her Cheesecake Factory Caesar salad hack, made with Louisiana chicken and caramelized onions, amassed over five million views and went so viral on TikTok that the restaurant added it to their menus nationwide for a limited time.

Part of the appeal might come down to an inoffensive base of romaine lettuce—less bitter or peppery than chicories or arugula—which costs less, is available year-round, and lasts longer than other greens, making it easier for restaurants to have on hand. It also helps that it is chock-full of magnesium and iron. Health advocate Tamika Smith says, “Caesar salad is one of my go-to choices during that time of the month…when my appetite isn’t there, and believe it or not, Caesar salad gives me a boost.”

Finally, it’s impossible to talk about Caesar salad without mentioning its most defining, if polarizing, ingredient: fatty anchovies slicked with oil, both a savory powerhouse and the crux of its identity crisis. In The Book of Simple Human Truths, author Molly Friedenfeld writes, “Lies are like anchovies in a Caesar salad. You may not be able to see them, but your soul knows they’re there.” While Brown’s recipe calls for six to eight anchovies, it laughably lists them as optional. But for Shapiro, anchovies, “the strongest identification of that salad,” are nonnegotiable.

“The anchovy element was so foreign that it mystified me when I found it out,” Ali Akbar says, “and I still don’t whether I grew up with [the anchovy] version or not.” Jennifer Irving, an Austin-based communications specialist who is vegetarian, says, “I’ll break for the anchovies in Caesar dressing—it’s the only non-vegetarian thing that I eat.”

Today, as chefs continue to experiment with chrysanthemum, pig ears, daisies, and kimchi in their salad renditions, Caesar’s influence is ever-present. It inspired prominent food writers to hunt down the best wrap version, which first emerged in popularity in the ’90s and was revitalized on TikTok by Gen Z in 2022 and dubbed the CCW (chicken Caesar wrap). Then came the Caesar salad fan accounts.

Still, the spartan salad has its share of detractors. “It’s ultra-fascinating how the Caesar is everywhere, but I bet that a plurality of Americans could not name anchovies as the main ingredient,” says Seung Park, the social and community lead at Mars Inc. “It’s just become one of those commodities that is a flavor descriptor in and of itself: ‘Caesar flavor.’”

Now, a century after it first appeared, we have Caesar salad chips, Caesar-spiced roast chicken, Caesar salad sandwiches, fries, burgers, and martinis, and even Caesar soup, which is arguably the opposite of a salad. Shapiro says, “Once you’ve had one, I feel like you’ve had them all. But why somebody would take Caesar salad and turn it into soup, that I cannot answer.”

It’s not exactly time to break up with the Caesar. Like any healthy relationship, the Caesar continues to evolve: its ever-changing add-ins reflect our zeitgeist, propelling it to victory. If you’re still not convinced, consider the lettuce wrap Caesar of the keto era and the green goddess Caesar, a natural progression to the cult favorite Baked by Melissa salad.

The Caesar’s reputation might be punching above its weight, but we’ll never stop publishing hundreds of thousands of words each year about this damn salad, as long as free speech exists. Like America, the Caesar salad is greater than the sum of its parts, a sacrosanct if unsophisticated relic of Americana because of what it represents: that more will always be more, that you have the choice to make it your own, and that there’s no such thing as too much cheese.

Recipe: The Cae Sal

Caesar salad photo: Molly Baz / Cook This Book