Caprese Salad Cups

Use the best quality tomatoes and mozzarella you can find - this simple dish depends on ingredient quality. Cherry or grape tomatoes are easier to portion than sliced. Fresh mozzarella should be at room temperature for best flavor. The wonton cups add satisfying crunch.

Caprese salad is named for the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples, where the combination of ripe tomato, fresh mozzarella, and basil is most plausibly traced to the 1920s. The origin story most consistently documented in Italian culinary history credits a construction worker and local entrepreneur named Vincenzo Costanzo, who created the salad at the Hotel Quisisana on Capri as a deliberate patriotic statement — the red of the tomato, white of the mozzarella, and green of the basil replicating the colours of the Italian flag. Each of the three ingredients arrives from a different part of the world. Tomatoes are native to western South America, brought to Europe by Spanish explorers in the 16th century and initially regarded with deep suspicion across much of Europe; they were only fully accepted as food in southern Italy by the 18th century — which makes the tomato one of the newer players in Campanian cooking despite now seeming inseparable from it. Mozzarella made from Italian water buffalo milk has a much longer local lineage: the water buffalo were likely introduced to Campania from South Asia in the 7th or 8th century, and documentation of the cheese they produce appears in texts from the 12th century onward. Basil (Ocimum basilicum) is native to South Asia, where it has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years; its name derives from the Greek basilikon meaning "royal" or "kingly," and it was established in Mediterranean gardens well before the Roman period. The wonton cup format that holds this particular version is a 20th-century American party-food invention, converting the traditional plated salad into a portable, self-contained canapé that needs no fork.