Eating Burgers with a Fork and Knife
Your taste of life in Paris and France
ParlerParis.com
Monday, June 6, 2011 • Paris, France
Dear Parler Paris Reader,
I've been on a search for a great Caesar salad all the years I've lived here, and I've come to the conclusion that it simply doesn't exist.
A Caesar salad is made of Romaine lettuce, croutons, Parmesan cheese, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, egg, Worcestershire sauce and black pepper. It was an Italian-Mexican, Caesar Cardini, who invented it while living in San Diego when on a 4th of July in 1924 the kitchen at the restaurant where he worked ran out of supplies, but he made a dramatic affair out of preparing it at the table and thereby starting a major culinary trend. According to legend, Julia Child had a Cardini salad herself when she was a child in the 1920s.
Lots of variations on the theme have cropped up over the years. Dressings were invented and sold, anchovies added and in recent years, chicken, steak or seafood added to enhance the concoction. My favorite is a Caesar salad topped with fried oysters found in any 'respectable' New Orleans restaurant, but just about any U.S. restaurant can make a good Caesar salad without much ado.
Not so in France.
Salads and sandwiches are not native to the French culture and only arrived on the scene within the last 20 years or so. Today, a long list of both adorn any café menu and for obvious reasons are popular, but, they still have not learned how to eat a hamburger with their hands, construct a really good sandwich, nor make a great salad, particularly the Caesar!
Sure, go ahead and defend the French for their culinary artistry. We all know they are the masters at complicated and delicate preparations fit for a king, but that's where they excel -- not with our kind of simple, convenient and fast-food kind of dining like sandwiches and salads. They have the greatest bread in the world (baguettes), yet they haven't yet figured out that if you slice an egg and lay it on the bread, that it will fall to pieces in your hands making it impossible to eat. (Have they never heard of 'egg salad?') And I still get a real chuckle when I see that fork and knife attack a burger and turn it into bits and pieces on the plate that must be eaten bit by bit instead of as it should -- as one bite of all the ingredients in one mouthful. I gave up on sandwiches long ago. Now, I'm going to give up on Caesar salads, too.
Last week I went to Christian Constant's 'Les Cocottes' on rue Saint-Dominique in the 7th (number 135). I adore this chef and love all four of his restaurants, so I was confident that his 'Vrai Salade César Ritz' would be just that "vrai" (real). "Au contraire!" It could not have been any further from the real thing. In fact the only thing it had in common with a Caesar Salad was the Romaine lettuce. After that, nothing, and I mean nothing, was the same. It wasn't even good, so sadly I sent it back.
At Café Charlot which gets my business several times a week (and where the food is top of the line), their Caesar is a whole lot better when I ask for all the ingredients to be served apart so that I can construct it myself. This way the balance of the chicken, parmesan, croutons and dressing is correct, plus the lettuce can be cut in bite-size chunks so it's easier to handle. (Did you know that it's rude to cut lettuce in France?...that one must 'fold' each leaf on the fork using a knife? So, you tell me how in the h--- you do that with Romaine?)
Nine times out of ten, a Caesar salad is served using another kind of lettuce and a host of other things have been dumped into it -- like tomatoes, eggs or olives. The only 'Caesar' about it is the store-bought dressing that gives it that Parmesan flavor. Then, they have the audacity to call is a 'Caesar.' The purist in me screams with indignation. Instead of risking having a bad Caesar, I'll order a Salade Niçoise -- a French invention and therefore much safer.
You can bet that whenever my toe touches U.S. soil I head for a restaurant that serves Caesar salads...or any great salad for that matter. In New York one of my favorites is the Chop't Creative Salad Company started by entrepreneurs Tony Shure and Colin McCabe in Union Square as long ago as January of 2001.
My dream is that some entrepreneurial American will open a chain of salad restaurants like that right here in Paris. Somebody needs to teach these French how to make a great salad and how to eat one without having to fold the lettuce. Don't you agree?
A la prochaine...
Adrian Leeds
Editor, Parler Paris
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P.S. Be sure to mark your calendar for next Tuesday's Parler Paris Aprés-Midi when the guest speaker of note is Karen Henrich talking about "Publishing in the Digital World: Incredible Opportunities for Self-Published Authors to Directly Reach Mass Audiences." Learn more by visiting parlerparis.com/apresmidi.html
