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    Vintage California Cuisine: 300 Recipes from the First Cookbooks Published in the Golden State
    Vintage California Cuisine: 300 Recipes from the First Cookbooks Published in the Golden State
    Vintage California Cuisine: 300 Recipes from the First Cookbooks Published in the Golden State
    Ebook212 pages1 hour

    Vintage California Cuisine: 300 Recipes from the First Cookbooks Published in the Golden State

    By Mark Thompson

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    About this ebook

    A selection of 300 recipes from the first cookbooks published in California show how culinary influences from around the world converged in the Golden State in the decades after the Gold Rush.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateFeb 5, 2014
    ISBN9780979551017
    Vintage California Cuisine: 300 Recipes from the First Cookbooks Published in the Golden State
    Author

    Mark Thompson

    MARK THOMPSON is coauthor of the bestseller Success Built to Last, is an executive coach, leadership expert, and investor. Forbes has called him "a venture investor with the 'Midas touch'".

    Read more from Mark Thompson

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      Vintage California Cuisine - Mark Thompson

      CHAPTER 1

      Discovering California Cuisine

      Marian Manners, the pen name for the Los Angeles Times’ food editor from the 1930s into the 1960s, used the term California cuisine for the first time in a column for the paper in 1945. Her characterization of the state’s distinctive culinary style foreshadowed, in at least a few respects, the phenomenon that would emerge in full flower several decades later. Manners noted, for instance, that salads of crisp, leafy greens presented with a simple flourish (tossed lightly – never stirred!) were quintessentially Californian, as were dishes with a trace of Mexican flavor and zest. But in most respects, her early notion about what constituted California cuisine was a far cry from the style of cooking that would be employed by a generation of chefs who were just being born around that time. In the culinary milieu of the immediate post-World War II years, vegetables came from jars and cans, and Manners was fully steeped in that way of thinking. She seemed oblivious to the fact that fresh produce is available in California year-round.

      One example of our California cuisine that she offered in a 1948 column, for example, was the New Combination Salad, composed of diced canned peaches, shredded cabbage, slivered filberts and mayonnaise. Another example of a California salad consisted of canned boned chicken, celery, hard-boiled eggs, a few cooked peas and mayonnaise. She insisted that only the freshest of such ingredients would do, employing one of the favorite mantras of chefs at the end of the century. But by that, Manners meant shoppers should be careful to look for a new, gay-colored shiny label on the canned chicken.

      It seems odd, in retrospect, that it took so long for cooks in the state to begin to take advantage of the abundance of fresh produce that was so near at hand. The flourishing farms and orchards that were beginning to spread across the sundrenched valleys of California certainly caught the eye of newcomers to the state in the first years after statehood. Their reports to friends and family back home were filled with exclamations about California’s agricultural bounty.

      A British immigrant in San Francisco in 1858, for one, was awestruck by the strawberries, according to a report published in The California Culturalist, a magazine for farmers and fruit growers launched in the aftermath of the Gold Rush. He marveled at the array of varieties – Peabodies, Ajaxes, Rubies, British Queens, Jenny Linds – some yielding bigger berries than he had ever seen. One specimen that he spotted in an Alameda market measured nine and a half inches in circumference, a bit bigger than a baseball. Most astonishing of all for the newcomer from the drizzly British Isles, strawberries were available in perpetually sunny California most of the year. He had visited Bay Area farmers markets from March through October and to his amazement, there was not a day during that whole time that strawberries grown by open culture were not gracing the market stands of our cities.

      In those days, tens of thousands of newly minted Californians, most of whom hadn’t struck it rich in the gold fields, were beginning to look around for alternative paths to prosperity. Some, noticing that crops of all sorts thrived along the sunny, ocean-cooled Pacific Coast, turned to farming. California has been an agricultural powerhouse ever since.

      Cooks, however, trailed generations behind California’s cultivators in realizing that the state’s beneficent climate could benefit them. There was virtually no discussion in The California Culturalist about what could be done with the bounty from the state’s rapidly proliferating farms and orchards, most of the output of which was dried, canned or otherwise preserved for shipment to markets that were hard to reach in those days. One of the few cooking tips that appeared in the periodical was offered for laughs. As an item in the same 1858 issue that reported on the British visitor’s impressions of California strawberries put it, Mrs. Mudlaw gives the following recipe for potato pudding, which she says she can recommend. ‘Take boiled taters, smash ‘em, add grease and sugar, and bake.’

      The varied array of fresh produce from California farms is the foundation on which the internationally acclaimed phenomenon that came to be known as California cuisine was built in the late 20th century. But in the late 19th century, for reasons ranging from underdeveloped transportation systems and rudimentary refrigeration technology to personal preferences, America wasn’t ready for what California’s farmlands could potentially offer. In those days, after all, fresh greens and vegetables were regarded as fare best suited for livestock, Harvey Levenstein observed in Revolution at the Table, a history of food in America during that era. People took their vegetables cooked into mush, which served as a sauce for the starring item on the dinner table: some form of meat. Juliet Carson was a voice in the wilderness when she admonished Americans in her 1879 cookbook, The Cooking Manual, to realize the wealth of green food abounding in their gardens and fields, which they have too long abandoned to their beasts of burden.

      Among the earliest cookbooks published in California, some began to show hints of an awareness of the culinary possibilities offered by the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables from nearby farms. An entrepreneurial San Francisco caterer named H.J. Clayton, for one, touted the virtues of buying directly from local farmers in Clayton’s Quaker Cook Book, published in 1883. And Jules Arthur Harder, head chef at the luxurious Palace Hotel in San Francisco, displayed an impressive breadth of knowledge of fresh produce, from arugula to winged beans, in his encyclopedic 1885 tome, The Physiology of Taste: Harder’s Book of Practical American Cookery. But at first, they were very faint hints.

      Agricultural trade groups at the end of that century took the lead in trying to pump up interest in fresh California produce among a wider, national audience. In the late 19th century, advances in refrigeration and transportation technology suddenly brought consumers across the country within their reach, and they seized on the allure of California as a sun-washed Garden of Eden to boost demand for their crops. Orange growers led the way. The California Fruit Growers Exchange, formed in 1893, trademarked the Sunkist brand name to help fix the linkage in the popular imagination between the oranges they sold and idyllic perceptions of the state where the fruit was grown.

      Not to be outdone, avocado growers coined the name calavo to distinguish the California-grown varieties from the reputedly inferior types of avocadoes grown in Florida, and joined forces in a marketing association called Calavo Growers of California. The association published a cookbook in 1932 called The New Calavo Hostess Book, touting dozens of ways of using the so-called aristocrat of salad fruits – in everything from salads and dressings to pie and ice cream.

      The hard sell helped boost demand for fresh citrus and a few other types of produce. But as mid 20th century approached, fresh fruits and vegetables were still largely ignored by most Americans, even Californians, judging from Manners’ early columns in the Los Angeles Times. The hottest food fads of that day revolved around heavily processed food ingredients. But times were changing.

      The first cookbook that fully expressed the sort of California cuisine that would conquer the culinary world in the 1970s and 1980s was Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book, published in 1952. A chef and writer who had relocated from New England to Pasadena in the 1930s, she dubbed the style of cooking featured in her book West Coast cuisine. She was one of the first prominent food writers to appreciate that the Pacific Coast was a prime location to experiment with new uses of fresh produce, blessed as the region was with tens of thousands of acres lush with fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains.

      In addition to its celebration of fresh produce, the other most notable hallmark of what would come to be known by the last quarter of the 20th century as California cuisine is a fusion of ingredients and cooking techniques from Asia, Latin America and Europe. Within the first decade of statehood in 1850, that diversity of ethnic influences was present in California, as the state filled up with gold seekers from locales as diverse as New England, Mexico, Chile and China. Yet most of the earliest cookbooks published in California showed little or no interest in culinary intermingling. There were exceptions – Santa Barbara Recipes, published in 1888, for one, and the 1903 Landmarks Club Cook Book, for another – but most early California cookbooks gave no indication that notions of California as an ethnic melting pot had infiltrated the kitchen.

      Helen Brown was a pacesetter in that respect, as well. Her 1952 cookbook gave full-throated recognition to the virtues of the various ethnic cuisines that had existed in the state – side by side but for the most part strictly segregated from each other – for a century. She acknowledged that Mexico has done many and wonderful things for our cuisine, and she noted that cooks up and down the Coast are learning to cook with a Chinese accent. The convergence of these cultural and agricultural ingredients made the Pacific coast a special place with a unique cuisine, Brown realized. Probably nowhere else in the world is there a region so calculated to delight the cook, she declared.

      By the early 1960s, Marian Manners had looked up from the canned food section in her local supermarket and was singing the same tune. In a 1962 Los Angeles Times column, State of Profusion: California – the Most of the Best, it was finally apparent that she had discovered that peaches didn’t just come from cans, they grew on nearby trees. In fact, California grows more peaches than any other state, along with 20 others kinds of fruit, and in the vegetable line almost anything, she boasted. It is a land of milk and honey, citrus and avocado, grapes and peaches, brussel sprouts and asparagus, salad greens in enormous variety, boysenberries and strawberries, cauliflower and squashes. It is also a land of turkeys, chickens, lamb, and a wide variety of seafood, and it is the sole producer of numerous crops, including raisins, walnuts, dates, olives, almonds and artichokes, Manners reported.

      In that same 1962 column, she also paid homage to the diversity of cultural influences on California cooking. California cuisine is a blend of old Mexican and Spanish, Oriental and influences from a half dozen other nations, she explained. Each wave of settlers has added back-home touches from Iowa, Illinois, or wherever.

      That was the dawn of the era of the jet airplane, which opened the way for California cuisine to become a national phenomenon. A so-called California Festival in 1966, at the Waldorf Astoria’s Peacock Alley restaurant in New York, made that point. Every day for the entire dreary month of March, the festival’s co-sponsor, American Airlines, delivered to executive chef Eugene Scanlon via jet freighter, a shipment of California ingredients including strawberries, asparagus, artichokes, figs, snow peas, abalone and dozens of other items that had been picked yesterday. He turned those items into a daily, all-California menu featuring dishes such as artichokes stuffed with California bay shrimp and Marshall strawberries macerated in California red wine. In pre-airplane days the only way a New Yorker could have a strawberry in mid-winter would be to buy the hothouse variety or berries grown by other artificial methods – none of them ever achieving the flavor of the freshly picked product, an article about the food festival in the Los Angeles Times observed.

      Joan Hansen’s book, Cooking California Style, published in 1971, was another important milestone on the way towards putting California on the culinary map. In fact, a brief mention of the book in the New York Times marked the first appearance of the term California cuisine in that trend-setting paper. But it was a handful of restaurants that started up in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles in the 1970s and early 1980s that vaulted the term into the vernacular. One of the first was

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