Caprese salad Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The Caprese is a starter from the island of Capri: rounds of tomato and mozzarella arranged in alternation, basil tucked between, olive oil poured over. Nothing is cooked. The dish is simply assembled, and its taste turns on the freshness of the three ingredients—tomato, mozzarella, basil—and on how they are brought together.

The tomato is what the dish cannot do without. Tomatoes came from the New World; they reached Italy in the sixteenth century, and only from the early modern period did they come to the table raw, as salad. Mozzarella is an old cheese of this land. But until the tomato had crossed the sea and spread as something eaten raw, a three-color plate like this had no way of coming into being.

In the record, the Caprese appears on Capri in the first half of the twentieth century. Accounts of when it was devised range from the 1920s to the postwar years, but that it was born on Capri is not disputed. It spread from the island's hotels and resorts, within the Italian food culture and tourism of the early twentieth century.

Several origin tales stand side by side for the Caprese. The one with the oldest support is the story of a Futurist banquet. In 1926, at a Futurist gathering held at the Grand Hotel Quisisana on Capri, a 'Dinner of the Future' menu was served. Answering the Futurists' distaste for pasta, a light three-color dish—red tomato, white mozzarella, green basil—was set out. This 1926 date is, for now, the oldest reference that can be confirmed.

One often-repeated line is worth untangling here: that 'the Caprese was invented by the Futurists.' But if you open 'La Cucina Futurista' (1932), the cookbook that Marinetti and his circle put before the public, the Caprese is not among its recipes. Closer to the sources than 'the Futurists created it as a new dish' is the record that it was already being served at their banquets. 1926 is not the year of its birth; it is the lower bound, the year by which it existed at the latest.

The name 'insalata Caprese' took hold, according to the Capri food historian Marino Barendson, in the restaurants of Capri in the 1930s. Then in the 1950s, served at the Quisisana to the exiled Egyptian king Farouk, the dish became known internationally. There is also a telling that a patriotic Capri stonemason in the postwar years pressed the flag's three colors into bread—but this one is thin on documentation and belongs to a later time than the Futurist banquet. The reading of the dish as a symbol of the flag looks to have been laid over it after it already existed.

And the oldest legend of all, the one that traces the Caprese to the Roman emperor Tiberius, who took his rest on Capri, cannot hold. The tomato reached Italy only from the sixteenth century, and the three-color arrangement appears only in the twentieth; a plate like this could not have stood on an ancient Roman table. The story of who devised it remains several theories in a row, but the single claim of an ancient origin has already fallen away.