Cobb Salad

Gather some chicken, a hard-boiled egg, cheese, and bacon. Arrange them on a plate with lettuce, an avocado, and tomatoes, then add French dressing. That’s a Cobb salad, invented at Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant late one evening in 1937. The story is that Bob Cobb, the restaurant’s proprietor, and his pal Sid Grauman, the prominent theater owner, were hungry. But the chefs were gone and these two had no interest in cooking. So they collected what they could find in the kitchen, put it together, and had a dandy meal. The next day, when Grauman came back for lunch, he asked the waiter for a “Cobb salad.” Within weeks, the movie colony was crazy for Cobb salad. Today, it has umpteen variations.