The Caesar salad is proof that a good story goes a long way

For some, there will likely be lots of things to celebrate this 4 July, but chief among them is that it is the 100th birthday of the Caesar salad (making it three months older than Jimmy Carter, three months younger than A Passage to India). These were the days of Prohibition; the dish was born in Tijuana, Mexico, which was booming as Americans crossed the border in search of something stronger than apple juice, where one Caesar Cardini ran a popular Italian restaurant. Legend has it that one day, struggling for ingredients, the proprietor cobbled together a mix of lettuce, croutons and Parmesan in a dressing of lemon juice, egg, oil, garlic, salt and Worcestershire sauce. It sounds absolutely disgusting, doesn’t it?

A hundred years on, you can find practically anything thrown into a bowl and called a Caesar, and not only chicken or bacon or anchovies. Kale, smoked trout, kimchi, carrot, chickpeas: endless crimes. You scarcely need the dressing; Caesar salad is more a state of mind. Although these variations are not true to the recipe we have come to know, they are true to the spirit of its creation: bundle some things together and hope for the best.

The Caesar salad is proof that a good yarn goes a long way. Even if you don’t know the origin story, the word Caesar is deeply appealing. This is the light lunch of a Roman emperor, you think, or at the very least someone taking a break from gambling in a famous Las Vegas casino. Cardini may not have thought of this, but the word association suits the dish: it is light but indulgent, a salad with lashings of salt, bread and cheese. A Cardini salad would not be marking its 100th birthday.

The Waldorf salad is similarly blessed: the invocation of a fancy hotel in New York helps dress up a concoction of celery, apples, grapes and mayonnaise – later walnuts too – that in other circumstances would sound like a punishment. It’s what makes that Fawlty Towers episode so funny, the idea that by ordering one, a sophisticated American guest might bring a modicum of civilisation even to Torquay, while Basil’s desperate alternatives – ‘lettuce and tomato’, ‘walnuts, cheese’ or ‘apples, grapefruit and potatoes in a mayonnaise sauce’ – are worse than the real thing.

They’re not the only dishes to gain from a grand title. A beef Wellington by another name might be thought of as a rather delicate thing, possibly even French. Instead it arrives as if clad in a red tunic, all hearty British oomph with a side of boot. Similarly, the name Pavlova adds a classiness that a pile of fruit, cream and meringue dumped together might not otherwise convey. You could even believe that it is light and airy like a Russian ballerina, rather than sweet and fatty like a delicious pudding.

The greatest origin story of all is the sandwich: the card table, the greedy English earl, the desperate need to keep gambling. The mythology is so powerful it spawned not only a handy snack but a way of thinking about the world. A verb as well as a noun. No matter that the whole gambling aspect seems to have been an invention. Much more likely is that the 4th Earl of Sandwich was a busy man and wanted to eat al desko. But no one likes to think of themselves as continuing a long tradition of joyless convenience eaters, least of all when they actually are. As Signor Caesar knew, when it comes to flogging your leftovers, branding is everything.