The Mail Carrier and the Tree He Almost Cut Down
Rudolph Hass delivered mail for a living. In the 1920s, he also grew avocados on a California property, buying seeds from a horticulturist named Albert Raymond Rideout. One of those trees sprouted a variety nobody recognized.
The Fuerte was the dominant avocado then—smooth-skinned and mild. Hass’s mystery tree produced something rougher and richer. He planned to chop it down. His kids stopped him. They preferred the taste of this new variety over everything else on the property, and their opinion won.
Hass patented the cultivar in 1935 and named it after himself. He died in 1952 with no idea that his children’s taste preference would eventually account for 95% of the American avocado market. The Hass now outsells every other variety in the country by an almost absurd margin.
The Chef Who Ran Out of Ingredients and Made History
Caesar Cardini was not Julius Caesar. This comes as a surprise to more people than it should.
Cardini was an Italian chef who emigrated to North America in the 1910s and built a restaurant in San Diego. Prohibition arrived in 1920, and he moved operations to Tijuana, where a restaurant could serve alcohol and draw American customers across the border.
On a busy Fourth of July weekend in 1924, the kitchen ran thin—romaine, olive oil, raw egg, croutons, Parmesan, Worcestershire sauce. He tossed it together tableside. Customers watched and asked what it was. He gave them his name.
Caesar Cardini’s salad became the Caesar salad, and it has been misattributed to an ancient Roman dictator ever since. Cardini’s daughter confirmed the origin story. The man who actually invented it ran a restaurant in Tijuana and was simply trying to feed a crowd with what he had left.
