How The Iconic Cobb Salad Was Invented
Though the timeless, iconic Cobb salad has a certain innate elegance — conjuring images of sophisticated lunches and upscale menus — its beginnings were anything but. The dish was, in fact, cobbled together from necessity, resourcefulness, and the best motivator of all: an empty stomach.
As culinary legend has it, the Cobb salad was an invention born from scrappiness, as one Robert Cobb, the owner of the star-studded Los Angeles restaurant the Brown Derby, stumbled into his kitchen after a long day serving customers. Most accounts say that Cobb, looking for a hasty meal he could throw together from the day's scraps, assembled lettuce, chicken, boiled eggs, some cooked bacon, chives, tomatoes, blue cheese, avocado, and salad dressing, and the Cobb salad — as it would come to be known — was born.
The combination of crunchy salad, buttery avocado, tangy blue cheese, and rich, hearty bacon, chicken, and eggs is a simple albeit delicious combo that would prove to have staying power. From the time of its birth (when it was soon put on the Brown Derby's menu as a permanent item) until today, Cobb salads are a mainstay on casual and high-end menus alike. You're as likely to find one on the menu of a fast food joint as you are at fancier restaurants (and who could forget the iconic Cobb salad mentioned in "Sex and the City"?).
As with most food history, the origin story isn't black and white
Like many food origin stories, the roots of the iconic Cobb salad are not always 100% agreed upon or set in stone. And it's far from the only dish for which this is true, with many foods we think we know the history of actually resulting from a storied web of reinvention, colonization, immigration, and reimagining — take the weird and wonderful history of the classic Oscar Mayer hotdog for example, or the immigrant roots of the old-school NYC cream soda.
All complexity aside, most food historians do at least agree that the Brown Derby in Los Angeles in the 1930s was the birthplace of the salad, but sources are split on whether Robert Cobb made it for himself or for his friend and next-door business owner Sid Grauman of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The main source of the original legend is from the Brown Derby itself, which is generally the most agreed-upon story behind the salad's invention.
The precise truth might well be lost to the annals of history, but if all this salad lore has you hungry, you likely have many of the necessary components of a Cobb salad already in your fridge. You could even make a big batch to enjoy for tomorrow's lunch, too, by keeping it fresh with these Cobb salad storage tips.