Caprese salad is a classic Italian dish named after the stunning island of Capri. It’s located in the Bay of Naples and is part of the breathtaking Amalfi Coast — known for its crystal blue waters, rugged cliff sides and pastel coloured houses.
The salad’s red white and green colour scheme is an homage to the Italian flag and is thought to be the creation of a patriotic Italian man during WWI.
It’s a no-nonsense combination of a handful of excellent Italian ingredients — fresh tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh mozzarella cheese, olive oil and salt, pepper and oregano. A delicious combination fit for a king you might say, and you could say! You see, it became incredibly popular after it was served as a sandwich to King Farouk of Egypt and the Sudan. He spent most of the 1950s in Italy and tried the Caprese during a notable visit to Capri.
Why Italy? Well, the king was exiled after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and found sanctuary there — first in Naples and later in Rome where he died in 1965. Why did anyone care about his taste in sandwiches? Well, he was a bit of an icon in Italy at the time.
In fact, he earned the nickname “The King of the night” during his time there because he spent countless nights in Roman nightclubs, surrounded by starlets from the Italian film scene and from Hollywood. In fact he was such a ladies man that it was rare for the paparazzi to find him without a woman on his arm — which is why he ultimately hired Albanian bodyguards to fend them off and seize their cameras as it was cheaper than paying newspaper editors not to publish their pictures. He had many notable mistresses during his time in Italy including his last “official mistress” Miss Naples, aka Irma Capece Minutolo.
He even supposedly “bought” quite a famous mistress, Swedish writer Birgitta Stenberg, from one of his closest friends who you also might have heard of — mafioso “Lucky” Luciano, the infamous father of organized crime in the United States who had been deported to Italy.
Stenberg offered a glimpse into how Farouk was perceived in public and in private when she documented her sexual escapades in her book “Karlek i Europa” which means Love in Europe.
And I quote…
“I’m doing this with the king of twenty million people. This nice fat man was one of the world’s symbols of power.”
When Farouk fled Egypt, he claimed to have left his wealth behind and referred to himself as a poor man during a press conference in Capri. Though he claimed to be scraping by, he somehow managed to scrape together enough lires to hire Italy’s top lawyer Carlo d’Emilio, rent out an enormous estate outside of Rome called the Villa Dusmet, and put all his kids in Le Rosey — an expensive and exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. The Caprese has remained a staple in Italian cuisine ever since it graced his not-so-poor lips — both as a salad and as a sandwich. Here’s how to make it at home…
Ingredients
Instructions
SOURCES:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprese_salad
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgitta_Stenberg
