EXCEPTION HAS GENTLY been taken to a recent comment of mine (in "California Cab," 11/19/03) that a Caesar salad just isn't a Caesar salad without anchovies. The exceptor is Mark Pastore, the owner of Incanto in Noe Valley. He contends that "the recipe was originally developed without anchovies" and cites a Web page (www.foodreference.com/html/artcaesarsalad.html) as persuasive, though I suspect not controlling, authority. The Web page is not unconvincing; it attributes the salad's origins to a Tijuana, Mexico, restaurateur named Caesar Cardini, who sometime in the 1920s threw the thing together in a certain amount of desperation – shortage of ingredients being a chief element of the crisis. (The disposition of stale bread, a staple in so many otherwise barren kitchens, seems to figure often in these sorts of tales.)

Our friend Google broadens the mystery. Caesar Cardini is a figure who turns up with some frequency in a search of the Caesar salad's origins, but then there is Giacomo Junia, a contender from Chicago who is said not merely to have used anchovies but Worcestershire sauce. This from a Web site (http://forums.bajanomad.com/viewthread.php?tid=957) announcing the death earlier this fall of Cardini's daughter, Rosa Maria. And, just to make matters that much more interesting, a user of the Web site's bulletin-board feature contends that Cardini didn't invent the Caesar but borrowed the recipe from his Italian mother.

Clearly we will never know the truth. My original point, anyway, was not that anchovies are necessary to the Caesar salad for purposes of historical authenticity but because the salad is a bit pale and flat without them. They bring a briny bite that helps cut the fat of the raw egg and the cheese.

On a related theme, a colleague asked me recently if it's true that the martini's origins can be traced to 19th-century California. Here the creation myths are even more confused, ranging from claims that the drink was named after the town of Martinez to, more plausibly, one attributing the martini's origins to an 18th-century Parisian composer named Johann Schwartzendorf, who was a quaffer of white wine mixed with gin. At some point (for reasons undisclosed) he changed his name to Jean Paul Aegide Martini.

Is this the most widely accepted account of the martini's beginnings? People will believe what they want or need to believe. The idea that the martini was born in California is surely as attractive to California partisans as the persistent belief – now disproved by DNA typing – that zinfandel is a wine grape native to the golden state.

All of this, of course, matters not a whit – it's just something to ponder at Zuni over a Caesar and a martini, or perhaps a glass of zin.