Making a Salad Fit for Caesar

You want confirmation? Hail Caesar. There are as many versions of the salad bearing his name as there are neighborhood steakhouses and suburban Olive Gardens. Caesars come with croutons and without and can come weighted down with grilled chicken, grilled steak, fried chicken, fried shrimp, roasted salmon, grilled portobellos, Grecian lamb and chickpeas, either fried or stewed. They come sometimes with bacon, with goat cheese, with yogurt. Your mother makes better, with anchovies. Or she does not, without.

What all these salads share: romaine, coated thick with emulsified oil that is bright with garlic and acidity, nutty with cheese and has some kind of salt-fish pong in it to bind the whole.

Buffs will tell you that Caesar Cardini invented this dish, whipping it up tableside at his restaurant in Tijuana in 1924, to serve Hollywood boozers come south to escape Prohibition and get something to eat. There was the requisite garlic and oil in his dressing, lemon and Worcestershire sauce, grated Parmesan and a coddled egg broken over the romaine at the end to slick the greens and coat the croutons. Anchovies did not make the cut. Though of course they were there, all the same, in the fine print on the bottle of Worcestershire sauce, a tiny ingredient that rose soon enough from the chorus to take on a starring role.

A recipe that most would recognize as a Caesar salad appears in the 1952 classic “Trader Vic’s Kitchen Kibitzer,” under the name “La Caseta Green Salad.” Victor Jules Bergeron, whose Trader Vic’s restaurants were a fixture of the Tiki-crazed 1950s and 1960s, attributed its creation to a “cleanly dressed Mexican lad, Jose,” down in “the famed Tia Juana.” As a dinner salad at La Caseta, Trader Vic wrote, Jose tossed the glistening, cheese-flecked greens “with a dozen or so anchovies and a liberal helping of croutons.”

As Julia Child told The Times in 2001, three years before her death, in a conversation about Caesar salad: “You know what happens to those recipes. People put in what they want after a while.” A Caesar is what you make of it.

So why not add smoked herring, the bacon of the sea? Hugue Dufour, who with his wife, Sarah Obraitis, runs the excellent M. Wells diner in Long Island City, steeps the fish in red-wine vinegar, both to mellow its saltiness and to calm the astringency of the vinegar, then whips the result together with more-traditional Caesar ingredients to create a loose mayonnaise. Tossed with torn romaine and fat brioche croutons glistening with butter and woodsy with thyme, then covered in a blizzard of finely grated Parmesan, this makes for an artful and pungent take on the old standard, whatever your old standard may be. It is head-shakingly delicious to boot.

Some notes on preparation. The thyme-flecked brioche is a fancy touch and a wonderful one, but if you want to ditch it in favor of the more traditional version, no one save an M. Wells maniac would disapprove.

More important: not all smoked herring is the same. Some of the tinned versions, available in many supermarkets near the canned tuna and red salmon, are watery and bland, especially in comparison with the whole kippered article you can sometimes find in delis and appetizing stores, in British-themed markets and always online. Taste what you get before you make the dish, and adjust the amount of fish you use accordingly. It is doubtful you will want to use less. Adding more may provide the smoky-sweet excellence you seek.

The same is true of the anchovies, if making a classic Caesar — which to my taste and opinion should be closer to Jose’s version than to Cardini’s, despite the name. You can, of course, omit the furry little critters entirely.

Finally, in whatever version of the salad, you will want to attend closely to the texture of the dressing. Its most important quality, whatever your ingredients, is one of smooth, thick creaminess: an emulsification of oil and acid liquids, with some of the appearance of dripping velvet. The egg yolk helps in this regard. If it does not, the mustard will. In a pinch, jammed up and scared because the guests are about to arrive, you could add a spoonful of mayonnaise to thicken things up. There is no shame in this. You render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.

Smoked-Herring Caesar Salad

3 tablespoons smoked herring, finely chopped

A scant 1/4 cup red-wine vinegar

1 clove garlic, peeled and finely chopped

1/3 cup Parmesan, grated (and more for finishing)

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 egg yolk, or 1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 cups brioche, cut into 1-inch cubes, approximately 3 thick slices

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

Kosher salt

2 heads romaine lettuce, roughly cut, well rinsed and dried.