Cobb salad Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Born in a Hollywood eatery

The Cobb salad appeared in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, and even the room it came from is known. From the late 1920s, as the film industry entered its golden age, Hollywood's glittering crowd gathered at a restaurant called the Brown Derby. It was in that kitchen that a salad of finely chopped ingredients, arranged for the eye, began to be served.

The parts were all close at hand. In Los Angeles from the 1920s through the 1940s, lettuce was a local staple, and tomatoes and avocados filled the markets. The method was just as plain: chop the ingredients, lay them out, and dress them with vinaigrette. Those familiar ingredients and that simple handwork came together, in a golden-age Hollywood restaurant, as a single signature dish.

Each ingredient of a different color is chopped fine and set out across the plate in bands: bacon, chicken, hard-boiled egg, tomato, avocado, blue cheese, and a red-wine vinegar dressing. The bright look and the heartiness made it a favorite in the city of the movies, and it settled in as the restaurant's specialty. A dish that an urban restaurant devised for its customers, and that its customers carried outward: it is that kind of food.

The Cobb salad comes with a story made for Hollywood. Bob Cobb, the owner of the Brown Derby, is said to have gone into the kitchen late one night, pulled out whatever odds and ends were left, chopped them, tossed them with dressing, and eaten them, and that this was how the dish began. A further flourish has him chopping everything small so that the impresario Sid Grauman, just back from dental work, could eat it easily. The naming is usually placed in 1937.

But the neat tale of one man making the salad in a single night is not supported by any independent contemporary record. Even the account quoted from the restaurant's own cookbook of 1949 has Cobb chopping up an avocado and other things from the refrigerator for his own dinner, then adding more ingredients a few days later; it gives no year, no late night, and no Grauman. Another account tells the beginning differently: the head chef devised the salad in Cobb's honor. A variant credits a different chef, and yet another, separate story dates the salad to 1929. The stories disagree on the essentials: was the maker the owner himself or a chef, and was the year 1937 or 1929? Even the night with Grauman wavers between a version in which the salad was served to Grauman and one in which Cobb ate it himself late at night. What has been handed down as a glamorous night to remember changes from one telling to the next.

Still, every one of these conflicting stories agrees on one point: this chopped salad came out of the Brown Derby and carried Cobb's name. On where it was born and whom it was named for, no version differs.

On the year, one more account is passed along. It comes from Bob Cobb's grandson, Bob Walsh: by his account, a dish worked up from leftovers in the 1930s went onto the Brown Derby menu, in an improved form, in 1935. But this is secondhand, relayed by a recent blog, and no menu or newspaper from the time bears it out. The earliest appearance of the name "Cobb salad" in a newspaper of the period is in a Hollywood evening paper of March 31, 1948, whose society column notes Joan Bennett and her daughter enjoying a Cobb salad at the Beverly Hills Brown Derby. No earlier use of the name in newspapers or menus has turned up so far. That mention, too, does not settle who created the salad or when.

In the end, the picture-perfect story of a single inventor and a single night of inspiration is not borne out by the record. Several versions of who made it and when stand side by side, and none can be chosen over the others. What does not waver is that this chopped salad came into the world from the Brown Derby, and that by 1948 at the latest it was reaching diners' plates under that name.