How the Caesar Salad Changed How We Eat

Long before there was “girl dinner,” for me, there was Caesar salad. In high school, when getting a pass to go off campus for lunch felt like the ultimate privilege, my girlfriends and I would decamp to our local Brighams’—a late, great restaurant and a fixture of many Massachusetts suburbs—and order our regular: black-and-white milkshakes and Diet Cokes, a shared plate of fries and onion rings, and giant bowls of Caesar salad, topped with garlicky croutons and a generous shower of shaved Parmesan. It was the ultimate gateway meal between childhood and adulthood: a salty, creamy, but still fresh dish, ideal for the ladies-who-lunch set we hoped to become. Though there was plenty we didn’t know at the time, we knew that the salad was always good.