Home › Amid the Bright Lights › Amid the Bright Lights
Amid the Bright Lights
mit the plagiarism. Here are congregated the most noted of the lively restaurants of the present day San Francisco. Here the streets are ablaze with light at night, and thronged with people, for here is the restaurant and theatre district proper of the city.
Among the restaurants deserving of special mention in this district are the two Solaris. When Solari opened his restaurant at 354 Geary street, where he continues to attract good livers by the excellence of his cooking, he at once achieved fame which has never waned. It so happened that there were two brothers, and as sometimes occurs brothers disagreed with the result that Fred Solari withdrew and opened a restaurant at Geary and Mason, just a short distance from the original place.
Evidently the recipe for what is considered best in both of the Solari restaurants came from common ownership, for each of these places gave in response to a request for its best recipe, the following:
CHICKEN COUNTRY STYLE Cut a chicken in eight pieces and drop them into some cold milk, seasoning with salt. After soaking for a few minutes dry the chicken in flour and lay in a frying pan in good butter. Place in the oven and let them cook slowly, turning them occasionally until they are nice and brown on all sides, when remove them. In the gravy put a tumblerful of cream and a pinch of paprika, mix well and let it cook for ten minutes, until it gets thick, then strain and pour over the chicken and serve.
The following "don'ts" are added to the recipe: Don't use frozen poultry. Don't substitute corn starch and milk for cream.
San Francisco holds no more interesting district than that lying around the base of Telegraph Hill, and
A restaurant recipe printed inside a chapter of description, so the cooking directions are compressed and assume a cook who already knows what browning chicken in butter looks like. The hinge is heat: the pan goes into a slow oven and the chicken is turned repeatedly, so the butter browns the skin without burning.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. "Cook slowly" is usually read today as something around 325F; butter much above 350F will darken and take on a scorched taste before a bone-in thigh is done. Bone-in pieces at that heat need roughly 45 to 60 minutes, turning every 10 to 15 minutes.
- A tumblerfulTumblers varied, but 8 fluid ounces is a reasonable reading, so take this as about one cup of heavy cream. Use cream with at least 36 percent fat; the warning against cornstarch and milk suggests the sauce was meant to take its body from the cream rather than from added starch.
- "Dry the chicken in flour"This means dredge the wet, milk-coated pieces in flour until the surface is dry to the touch, not dry them and then flour them. Shake off the loose excess or it will sludge into the butter.
- Cut in eight piecesTwo drumsticks, two thighs, two wings and the breast halved. A 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird divides this way cleanly and serves four; a modern 5 lb roaster is better cut into ten.
- The milk soakA few minutes in salted cold milk is seasoning and adhesion, not a brine. It does very little if the milk is not salted properly, so salt it as you would soup.
- Straining the sauceOnce the cream has cooked down for ten minutes it is strained to remove the toasted flour and butter solids. Do not skip this; unstrained, the sauce is gritty and speckled rather than the ivory cream the restaurants were selling.
- DonenessCook thigh and drumstick to 175F and breast to 165F. Because everything goes into the pan at once, pull the breast pieces earlier and hold them warm while the dark meat finishes.
- The "don'ts"The warning against frozen poultry reflects 1914 freezing methods, which ruptured cells and left the meat slack and watery. Modern frozen chicken thawed slowly in the refrigerator will work, though fresh still browns better because it sheds less liquid into the butter.
This comes from Clarence Edwords's Bohemian San Francisco (1914), a book that set out to record the restaurants of the city and their recipes, with the 1906 earthquake and fire never far from the account; the passage itself places the theatre and dining district in these blocks. The Solaris were part of the large Italian restaurant trade in San Francisco in this period. Edwords's aside about the brothers' falling out and the identical recipe is offered wryly. "Country style" here goes with a plain treatment: chicken browned in butter and finished with cream, without stock or wine. The two appended "don'ts" are the more revealing part of the entry, since both point at substitutions a restaurant of the day might be tempted into, cold-storage poultry and cornstarch-thickened milk standing in for cream.