Tomato Caesar

Lately I have been having Caesar salads for lunch, with one thing or another added on top. Fried chicken and turkey breasts, cut into strips and still a little warm, go excellently with the flavours of Caesar dressing and Parmesan. Since I got back from my trip I have been trying to keep the calories down anyway, and a salad makes an easy lunch for that. A good three quarters of the ten tomatoes I dried yesterday are still left, so today, untypically for me, I decided to go purely vegetarian and make a tomato Caesar.

To me Caesar salad is above all an American lunch. In Boston you could get it with chicken at almost any lunch place, and that is probably where I picked up the habit of eating it. I read somewhere, though, that it was put together by an Italian-born restaurateur, Caesar Cardini, at his restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1924, when the kitchen ran short of supplies in the middle of a rush. Many of the customers, so I have read, were Americans who had come across the border to get away from Prohibition back home. In the original the romaine leaves were left whole and eaten with the fingers, held by the stem. I cut mine into pieces.

I am too lazy to make Caesar dressing from scratch, since Felix, the brand every Finn knows from its ketchup bottles, has taken care of it for me. Making it myself would probably give a tastier dressing, but I have no blender, and besides the laziness I suspect a homemade dressing would not keep very long. The traditional one has, along with olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and Worcestershire sauce, an egg boiled for only a moment. Anchovies, I gather, were not in Cardini's salad at all, though nearly every recipe nowadays seems to have them. The fishy note came from the Worcestershire sauce alone, which has anchovy in it already. When all I need at a time is a splash, the scales have tipped towards the factory product. Romaine comes in a little pot at the shop here, roots and all, and one pot is just right for one person. I grate the Parmesan from a piece straight into the bowl.

With a moderate hand on the dressing and the Parmesan, one helping of the salad comes to about 120 kilocalories, which is suitably light for a slimming lunch. A hundred grams of chicken or turkey makes it more filling and adds no more than another 120 kcal.

The helping in the picture has two dried tomatoes, each cut into eight pieces. Between them they come to only 40 kilocalories. After a night in the fridge the tomatoes were every bit as juicy as when they came out of the oven, and their texture was pleasantly meaty, so the salad felt perfectly satisfying for all its vegetarianism. Yum!