Insalata Caprese that amazingly easy, yet often perfect array of sliced tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and basil leaves drizzled with olive oil is the sixth most frequently found item on Italian menus. It is served at nearly half of the Italian-themed restaurants in the country. Bright, vibrant and straightforward, it exemplifies much of true Italian cuisine. It’s a dish that excels only when ripe tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and high quality extra virgin olive oil are used. Unfortunately, in too many restaurants, especially lesser, non-Italian ones, this is too often not the case.
As simple as the dish is, it is actually a fairly recent creation. In his very enjoyable Far Flung and Well Read, globe-trotting journalist and gourmand R.W. Apple, related, “insalata Caprese, invented in the 1950s at the Trattoria da Vincenzo on the Isle of Capri - just sliced tomatoes, cow's milk mozzarella, basil and a slim filament of olive oil.” It might not have been mozzarella, actually. According to legendary restaurateur Tony May of San Domenico fame, founder of the Gruppo Ristoranti Italiani and, not incidentally, a native of the Naples area, “la Caprese initially was not with mozzarella but with treccia. This version is also fresh cheese similar to mozzarella, a bit drier and prepared in braids.”
Though insalata Caprese is sometime made with buffalo mozzarella – usually at the more expensive places – this is not the original version, nor the most authentic.
One of the first to serve insalata Caprese in this country was Tavola Caldo da Alfredo in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. This was another concept from Alfredo Viazzi, who might have earlier introduced the trattoria to this country with his Trattoria da Alfredo (though not the fettuccine dish of the same name). Primavera, the long-running spot run by Nicola Civetta on the Upper East Side that has just shuttered, was seemingly also serving it by the end of the 1970s.
Insalata Caprese in form, and sometimes in name, became common at Los Angeles area Italian restaurants during the 1980s. Its lightness and freshness seems a natural fit for southern California. It was also found fairly readily in New York, at least outside of the red sauce bastions. La Scala Presto Trattoria was even serving Mozzarella Bufala a la Caprese in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles by 1985, as was Fiorella in Manhattan. Angeli in Los Angeles had already had the now-common twist of adding balsamic vinegar to the mix also in the mid-1980s.
Insalata Caprese became more widespread during the 1990s, but really ubiquitous throughout the country in the last decade or so.
Like the previous articles this data is from over 300 current and recent Italian restaurants in thirty-five states in a wide variety of price ranges.
Comments