Cobb Salad

A salad of lettuce topped with pieces of chicken, cheese, bacon, hard-boiled egg, avocado, and tomato, typically served as a main course. The dressing is a classic vinaigrette with red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil although we can replace everything with a yogurt-based sauce. The origins of Cobb 's salad are a bit doubtful but it seems that the name derives from Mr. BOB COBB at the time and we are talking about 1937, owner of the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. Do you remember the Cobb salad, with its history of where it was created, including references to Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable?

Brown Derby, an iconic restaurant of the Hollywood Golden Age, which no longer exists. This is the historic place where, for example, Clark Gable asked for Carole Lombard's hand and where Marilyn Monroe met Joe Di Maggio, whom she then married. In stories like these, I find that touch of old-fashioned Hollywood romance that is good for my heart, despite the successive divorces of the characters I mentioned and the closure of the restaurant.

Late at night while our friend Bob Cobb was in his restaurant with a friend the dreamer Sid Grauman also restaurateur and owner of the Chinese Theatre (TCL Theatre), he was assailed by an atavistic hunger and prepared this salad by inserting as ingredients everything that the cooks had left at hand thus creating one of the most appreciated American salads very rich in ingredients and very appetizing! The success as mentioned was immediate, so much so that even today we can order it in many American restaurants.

This COBB SALADE was much appreciated and copied by other American chefs and as always when the recipes spread quickly, we find small variations both for the ingredients and for the seasoning of the recipe. It is also true that this COBB salad... We certainly can not define it very light and light let's say that I recommend it as a single dish and not as a side dish to a grill or a roast because if we go to count the nutritional values ehm ehm!

Ingredients

FOR THE COBB SALAD

2 slices chicken breast

50 g bacon (toasted and crumbled)

2 eggs (hard-boiled)

salad to taste (for me mixed salad, iceberg, escarole etc.)

1 avocado

5 cherry tomatoes 

50 g gorgonzola 

ORIGINAL COBB SALAD DRESSING

extra virgin olive oil to taste

Red wine vinegar to taste

salt to taste

Steps

As you can see from the photo I prepared COBB's salad for a regiment but it is a dish that can be prepared in advance and assembled at the last moment and for dinner with friends the other night it seemed ideal! Then start cooking the hard-boiled eggs starting from cold water and calculating about 8 minutes from the time of boiling. I then put the eggs in cold water and after a few minutes I shelled them and then cut them into slices when they were definitely cold. The bacon needs a quick cooking that I did on the grill but you can also use a simple pan: important is to make the beautiful slices toasted almost crispy so that they could crumble on the rest of the ingredients I chose as a salad of mixed salad because it is tender, it is mixed and ... because I like it! I also dry these leaves and start to arrange all the various ingredients of the COBB SALADE on the serving plate. I then prepare a large dish for this single dish by putting in fairly neat rows the chosen salad, the avocado cut into slices, the slices of grilled chicken or cooked in a pan (even if left over in the refrigerator eh), the washed tomatoes dried and cut into wedges, the crispy bacon, the slices of blue cheese such as gorgonzola and boiled eggs in wedges. I immediately bring to the table and season with the classic vinaigrette or with the yogurt sauce obtained by mixing all the ingredients indicated above!

Rich tasty and complete... enjoy your meal with Cobb's salad!