When is a salad more than just a salad? When it's an artifact of cultural history — a remnant of a time and place that now lives only in the imagination.

Las Vegas, Nev., before Las Vegas, the Monte Carlo of the Americas. This was Tijuana in the 1920s where movie stars Gable, Garbo or Chaplin might be seen playing golf, or baccarat, or catching a stage show that featured a young dancer who would later change her name to Rita Hayworth. A place where palatial casinos sprouted Moorish minarets, and where a racetrack and swanky bars offered pleasures prohibited on the other side of the border.

It bore little resemblance to the Tijuana of today, where even the ghosts of its fabled past are gradually disappearing, including, this past September, Caesar's Restaurant — generally regarded as the birthplace of the eponymous Caesar salad — another victim of the U.S. economic crash, drug violence at the border, and, perhaps, the passage of time.

Here in Santa Fe, the last place that served Caesar salad prepared tableside — part of the Caesar's allure — was The Palace Restaurant, which closed nearly seven years ago. Since then, only echoes of the great Caesar can be found around town.

In October, at a picnic at Aspen Vista, Tina Davila prepared a picnic-tableside Caesar from a recipe provided by her father, Julio Caesar Davila, a retired surgeon who grew up in San Diego. Dr. Davila's father, also named Julio, was an engineer who, in the 1920s, commuted to Tijuana to work on the racetrack. He frequently stopped at Caesar's Restaurant, where he struck up a friendship with Caesar Cardini, the Milan-born restaurant owner who popularized and perhaps invented the now-famous salad, which is sometimes referred to as Caesar salad, and sometimes — as Dr. Davila recalls — Caesar's salad.

The recipe Tina used for our picnic salad is complex, calling for ingredients that many Caesar purists would scoff at, including June, Dr. Davila's wife, an avowed epicure who once celebrated her birthday with celebrity chef Jacques Pepin. But Dr. Davila insists that his is the original Caesar salad recipe as bestowed on his father by Cardini himself, back in Tijuana's heyday.

In an introduction to his transcription of the recipe, Dr. Davila writes, "It was ... perhaps 3-4 years after the birth of The Salad that Dad got the 'original' recipe. He used to say that his recipe was that which Cardini himself gave him and specified as the original ... my guess is that ... he put everything but the kitchen sink into that first salad. In later years, as the legend grew and people ordered the famous dish, he must have modified it numerous times ..."

Arguing about the Caesar is nothing new — aficionados defend variously Cardini, his brother, his aunt, his chef, his chef's mother or someone unrelated as the inventor. They champion anchovies — Cardini's daughter Rosa maintained they weren't in the original — versus Worcestershire sauce, or insist on vinegar as well as lemon juice. Was the salad an impromptu invention for late-arriving Hollywood swells after a busy Fourth of July rush in 1924, when Cardini tossed together what was left in the kitchen? Or did Cardini's brother Alessandro first prepare it during an aviation show and call it Aviator's Salad? However you toss it — and how you toss it is also the subject of discussion — the Caesar is more than just a sublime marriage of crisp Romaine lettuce, sharp lemon, unctuous raw eggs, tangy Parmesan, suave olive oil and garlicky croutons (Rosa disputed even the croutons).

It is the taste of glamour and sophistication, of old Tijuana in the roaring '20s. A group of French chefs in the 1950s even called it America's greatest culinary invention. As to whether Julio Davila's Caesar is the original or not, it certainly could be. According to an article by Christopher Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, a racetrack opened in Tijuana in 1928 at the famous Agua Caliente casino. By that time, if the most oft-cited legend of the Caesar is true, Caesar's was already serving Caesar's salad.

In the 1930s, the teenaged Dr. Davila ate at Caesar's with his father and, though he has not been back for decades, he heard that in recent years "it was a mere shadow of its former self." Caesar's Restaurant may be gone, but his salad — or at least the one he made famous — lives on.


JULIO DAVILA'S 'ORIGINAL' CAESAR'S SALAD

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Ingredients for 4-6 people:

6-10 whole leaves per person of crisp, young Romaine lettuce, washed, dried, and chilled

1-2 large clove(s) garlic 1-2 tablespoons Spanish or Italian capers in water, drained and pat dry

1 tin Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish anchovies in olive oil, drained and diced

1 2-inch section of fine, dry Italian salami, julienned

Juice of 1/2 to 1 medium lemon

Light Italian olive oil, enough to coat all leaves

1 tablespoon water

1 heaping teaspoon Coleman's English Mustard powder, no substitutions

1.5 to 2 ounces or a little less than 1/4 cup of whole or heavy cream 1/3 to 1/2 oz. or about 1 tablespoon Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, no substitutions

1 raw egg yolk

1/4 to 1/3 tsp. sugar

1/3 to 1/2 cup of fresh, fine-grated, authentic Parmesan cheese

2-3 cups fresh, preferably homemade croutons from good French or Italian bread or Mexican bolillos

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Preparation: In a small bowl mix water and mustard until no lumps are left and add cream, egg yolk, Worcestershire sauce and sugar. Beat until smooth. Set aside. If croutons are homemade, they may be fried lightly in a small amount of olive oil to which a clove of garlic has been added. Assemble all ingredients in small bowls for tableside preparation. Rub the inside of a large wooden bowl with a clove of garlic until the clove is spent. Chop or leave whole and arrange Romaine leaves in bowl and drizzle over olive oil, a little at a time, rolling the leaves over one another as you go, until leaves are lightly and evenly coated with oil. Repeat drizzling with lemon juice — half the lemon is usually enough.

Repeat drizzling with mustard-cream mixture, then sprinkle on the capers, salami and anchovies — be careful that these ingredients don't all settle to the bottom — then Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper to taste, and again with croutons reserving some to sprinkle across the top of the finished salad.

Arrange portions of salad on individual plates — perhaps in a fan shape if left whole. You may want to spoon capers, salami and anchovies from the bottom of the bowl into the grooves of the leaves. If left whole, diners may choose to pick up leaves by the ends with their fingers to eat like asparagus.