Caesar Salad Recipe

This weekend the movie Julie and Julia comes out, tracking the life of Julia Child and the blogger, Julie Powell, who set out to cook every dish in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The movie has gotten everyone cooking Julia Child’s recipes and celebrating how she made French technique accessible for average American cooks, through both her cookbook and television show. When Emma and I set out to start Kitchen Caravan we rented a few of her old episodes to watch the way she hosted the show. I had not watched them since I was a little girl, and had forgotten how down to earth Julia was. Her no-frills, realistic approach let me know it was ok to be myself as the host of the show.

This coming weekend we are going to celebrate the release of the movie with our neighbors by each cooking a dish from her Mastering cookbook bible. I know that they have already made a Soupe de Possoin with striped bass that they caught in the Sound. We are going to make her Plum Clafoutis, since there are more plums than cherries nowadays at the markets.

I will be posting another recipe next week on her birthday, but in the meantime I wanted to do my own tribute to Julia, which was actually inspired quite recently. A few Sundays ago I had the mid-afternoon boredom blues and was watching TV. I came across an old episode of her show with Jacques Pepin. They were putting together a variety of salads, and one of the ones they made was a classic Caesar. I love Caesar Salad and was eager to see if she made her dressing with anchovies and raw egg, but what came was something totally unexpected. Julia had learned how to make the recipe by the daughter of the owner of the restaurant in Tijuana where the dish originated. She made it with romaine hearts tossed with olive oil, lemon juice, and a 1-minute egg. They added the staple freshly grated parmesan cheese, but that was it. She refused to put anchovies, capers, cream- all of those things that end up in a Caesar these days. Today I made the dish for myself as she had on the television, and it was gorgeous. I used farm fresh eggs that I had bought yesterday and did the 1 minute boil, which I had never used before. The salad was refreshing, yet ever so slightly rich, and completely delicious. Below is an adaptation of the quantities, as I had to approximate and so will you. I am going to post this in the way Julia writes her recipes, with the ingredients listed as they are incorporated in to the dish.

Julia’s Caesar

1-2 slices of French bread (not baguette)

Cube the bread and toast in a toaster oven (Julia would have sautéed these in butter, but it is better when they sop up the dressing from the salad).

2 Romaine heads
Freshly grated sea salt and black pepper

Discard the outer leaves of the romaine, and separate the remaining leaves from the core. Rinse them well and slice into 2 inch pieces. Transfer to a serving bowl.

2 tablespoons olive oil
Juice of ½ lemon

Drizzle in the olive oil and lemon juice and toss the leaves well.

1 egg, boiled for 1 minute

Crack in the 1-minute boiled egg and toss quickly to coat the salad.

Good knob of Parmesan cheese

Grate the cheese over the lettuce and toss one last time.

Makes 4 appetizer portions.