Nostalgia Cooked
July 21, 2026
No. 7

“Hands, please”

The Tijuana kitchen story behind the Caesar salad; the strange logic of July, the one month when a season's chaos got canned into a year's worth of pantry, all thanks to a starving French army; and three things worth your time this week, including the once-tourist-trap San Francisco diner people are suddenly lining up for.

Coffee, then read on.

- Chef Tim

I don't think Christmas is the best time to eat in America. I don't think Thanksgiving is either. It's the last two weeks of July.

Walk through a farmers market right now and you'll see why. Tomatoes finally taste like tomatoes. Sweet corn barely needs butter. Watermelons split open with a crack. Peaches drip down your arm. Blackberries stain your fingertips. Cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, green beans, potatoes, onions, tomatillos, herbs and more all seem to arrive within days of one another. It's easy to think that's just how summer works. It isn't.

For most of American history, this wasn't just the best month to eat. It was the most important month of the year. While we're planning cookouts, farms are running at full speed. Tomatoes need picking almost every day. Sweet corn starts turning sugar into starch the moment it's harvested. Peaches don't wait. Berries certainly don't. Everything seems to ripen at once. Farming is a challenge for sure but so isfiguring out what to do when it all arrives together.

Today we have freezers, refrigerated trucks and grocery stores stocked year-round. For generations, families had only three choices: eat it, preserve it or watch it spoil. That's why July became canning season. Tomatoes became sauce. Peaches became jam. Cucumbers became pickles. Watermelon rinds became sweet pickles while the fruit could be cooked into watermelon molasses. Tomatillos became salsa verde. Beans were canned or dried. Herbs were hung from the rafters, and potatoes and onions were tucked into root cellars to feed a family through the winter.

Even corn tells the story. We think of it as something to serve beside a steak, but it's also cornmeal, grits, masa, hominy, cornstarch, corn oil, bourbon and hundreds of other products that quietly shape American life. The ear on your plate is only a small part of the harvest.

One of my favorite food stories begins with Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1795, desperate to feed his armies, he convinced French government to offer a cash prize for a better way to preserve food. A French confectioner named Nicolas Appert discovered that food sealed in glass jars and heated could last for months, laying the foundation for modern canning. Before long, preserving July became an American ritual, turning one month of abundance into a pantry that lasted all year.

Maybe that's why this month feels different. For a few short weeks, the fields give us more than we could ever eat, and the rest is up to us.

So the next time you spoon peach jam onto toast, open a jar of tomato sauce in January, or bite into a crunchy dill pickle in the middle of winter, take a second to appreciate the strange chain of events that made it possible. A French emperor desperate to feed his army. A glass jar. A summer harvest that arrived all at once.

Thank you, Napoleon.

Thank you, July.

And most of all, thank you, Mother Nature.

Before service, the whole crew huddles up and someone tells the story behind food. Pull up a crate you’re on the line tonight.

The greatest restaurant special that never went away.

The Caesar salad is everywhere. It appears at steakhouses, pizza shops, hotel restaurants and airport bars. It has survived nouvelle cuisine, the low fat era, kale and every other food trend thrown at it. More than a century after its invention, people are still happily paying for romaine, croutons, Parmesan and dressing.

Despite the name, it has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. The generally accepted story begins on July 4, 1924, at Caesar’s restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. Caesar Cardini was an Italian immigrant and restaurateur who operated south of the border during Prohibition, where thirsty Americans could escape for dinner, gambling and legal alcohol. When an Independence Day crowd overwhelmed the restaurant, Cardini supposedly gathered what remained in the kitchen and prepared a salad tableside for extra drama.

That is the official version, but famous dishes rarely come with tidy histories. Caesar’s brother Alex, a former military pilot, also claimed a role. One version says Alex created an anchovy-heavy variation called the Aviator’s Salad for fellow pilots. Another goes further and gives Alex credit for inventing the entire dish before Caesar attached his own name to it. Even the story about the kitchen running out of food may be a little too perfect. Some members of the Cardini family said Caesar was not desperate at all. He simply understood that guests loved watching a confident restaurateur make dinner beside their table.

The original was simpler than many Caesars today. Whole romaine leaves were coated with garlic, lemon, olive oil, egg, Worcestershire sauce and Parmesan so they could be eaten with the fingers. Caesar Cardini’s version did not contain anchovy fillets. The fish flavor came from Worcestershire sauce, although Alex’s variation reportedly added anchovies directly.

Julia Child remembered eating the salad in Tijuana as a child and later helped preserve the Cardini family’s version. You can still visit Caesar’s on Avenida Revolución, where the salad continues to be prepared tableside.

Since then, the Caesar has escaped the salad bowl entirely. We now have kale Caesars, Brussels sprout Caesars, Caesar wraps, Caesar pizzas and Caesar pasta salads. Beginning July 21, McDonald’s is even launching its first Caesar dipping sauce, flavored with Parmesan, garlic and lemon. It is intended for the company’s crispy chicken offerings, but you can order a cup alongside your McNuggets.

The salad that began on a rolling cart in Tijuana has officially reached the drive through. That is a pretty remarkable run for a dish that may have started with one restaurateur looking around his kitchen and deciding to put on a show.

What is your favorite version of the Cesar salad?

Top Tip

Everyone reaches for a Chardonnay with Caesar salad. That's a perfectly respectable trick if you're just begging for scraps.

But if you've built a proper Caesar, real anchovies, real garlic, real parmesan, pour a crisp Sauvignon Blanc instead. Cloudy Bay out of Marlborough is the move here, sophisticated enough for the occasion and worth the $30. The citrus and grassy snap cut through the richness of the dressing and cheese without rolling over for it. Every bite stays sharp, which is exactly what you want when the croutons keep disappearing before the lettuce does.

This one's got my tail wagging, and that doesn't happen for just anybody.

Buell's Booth
Slide in, grab a seat. Every week, one question and one comment straight from the counter. Feel free to shoot me questions anytime!

“How do you nail the timing? I've been getting into live fire cooking and I'm hooked. But so much of it seems to come down to choreography: managing the fire and embers while working out when the meat goes on versus the vegetables versus everything else, so a dozen different things all land on the table hot and ready at once. Get the fire right and mistime the food, and you're cooked, so to speak. So how do you think about timing? Is there a method to it, or just a sixth sense you develop?”

I think it’s part sixth sense and part experience. The longer you do something, the more you understand about how fire works and where your hot spots are going to be. So when you are cooking broccoli on the grill for the first time, you realize you have a lot more wiggle room than a piece of asparagus for example. Everything matters. Water content, temperature control, grill cleanliness, fat buildup. So the more you do it, the more your sixth sense develops. Unfortunately, there are no quick hacks for grilling properly, just patience and experience.

"I'd love it if my server told me about just one dish instead of rattling off five specials I forget by the time the bread hits the table. One dish, one story, sold."

That's exactly it. Nobody remembers the fifth special. They remember the one the server got excited about. Maybe that's how a dish earns its name back, not from a menu description, but from somebody telling its story out loud, one table at a time.

The Nostalgia Table

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