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As It Was in the Beginning
First we have the old Spanish daysthe days "before the Gringo came." Then reigned conviviality held within most discreet bounds of convention, and it would be a misnomer, indeed, to call the pre-pioneer days of San Francisco "Bohemian" in any sense of the word. Courtesy unfailing, good-fellowship always in tune, and lavish hospitality, marked the days of the Donsthose wonderfully considerate hosts who always placed a pile of gold and silver coins on the table of the guest chamber, in order that none might go away in need.
Their feasts were events of careful consideration and long preparation, and those whose memories carry them back to the early days, recall bounteous loading of tables when festal occasion called for display.
Lips linger lovingly over such names as the Vallejos, the Picos, and those other Spanish families who spread their hospitality with such wondrous prodigality that their open welcome became a by-word in all parts of the West.
But it was not in the grand fiestas that the finest and most palatable dishes were to be found. In the family of each of these Spanish Grandees were culinary secrets known to none except the "Senora de la Casa," and transmitted by her to her sons and daughters.
We have considered ourselves fortunate in being taken into the confidence of one of the descendants of Senora Benicia Vallejo, and honored with some of her prize recipes, which find place in this book, not as the famous recipe of some Bohemian restaurants but as the tribute to the spirit of the land that made those Bohemian restaurants possible. Of these there is no more tasty and satisfying dish than Spanish Eggs, prepared as follows:
SPANISH EGGS Empty a can of tomatoes in a frying pan; thicken with bread and add two or three small green peppers and an onion sliced fine. Add a little butter and salt to taste. Let this simmer gently and then carefully break on top the number of eggs desired. Dip the simmering tomato mixture over the eggs until they are cooked.
Another favorite recipe of Mrs. Vallejo was Spanish Beefsteak prepared as follows:
SPANISH BEEFSTEAK Cut the steak into pieces the size desired for serving. Place these pieces on a meat board and sprinkle liberally with flour. With a wooden corrugated mallet beat the flour into the steak. Fry the steak in a pan with olive oil. In another frying pan, at the same time, fry three good-sized onions and three green peppers. When the steak is cooked sufficiently put it to one side of the pan and let the oil run to the other side. On the oil pour sufficient water to cover the meat and add the onions and peppers, letting all simmer for a few minutes. Serve on hot platter.
Spanish mode of cooking rice is savory and most palatable, and Mrs. Vallejo's recipe for this is as follows: SPANISH RICE Slice together three good-sized onions and three small green peppers. Fry them in olive oil. Take one-half cup of rice and boil it until nearly done, then drain it well and add it to the frying onions and peppers. Fry all together until thoroughly brown, which will take some time. Season with salt and serve. These three recipes are given because they are simple and easily prepared. Many complex recipes could be given, and some of these will appear in the part of the book devoted to recipes, but when one considers the simplicity of the recipes mentioned, it can readily be seen that it takes little preparation to get something out of the ordinary.
Three Californio family recipes embedded in a chapter of reminiscence. All three are workable as written; the vagueness is in quantities and in what the period meant by "green peppers."
- The can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes in this period were commonly sold in what canners called No. 2 and No. 3 sizes, roughly 20 oz and 32 oz, though sizes were not yet standardised. A 28-oz can of whole or crushed tomatoes is a sensible reading for a skillet dish serving four.
- "Thicken with bread"This means torn bread or dry crumbs stirred into the tomatoes until the sauce holds a spoon mark — start with about half a cup and add more as it simmers. The point is a bed thick enough that the eggs sit on top rather than sinking.
- Green peppersIn Spanish California kitchens this often meant fresh green chiles of the long Anaheim or California type rather than bell peppers, and "two or three small" ones suggest moderate heat. Bell peppers give the sweetness without the backbone; a mix of one bell and two Anaheims is a reasonable approximation.
- Cooking the eggsThe hinge of the Spanish Eggs is spooning the hot tomato over the tops instead of covering the pan. Keep the heat low enough that the tomato barely moves — six to eight minutes gives set whites and soft yolks, and much beyond ten minutes the yolks chalk over.
- The corrugated malletA ridged meat mallet, used here to pound seasoned flour into the steak rather than merely to flatten it. Any modern tenderizer or the edge of a heavy plate does the same job; the flour is what thickens the pan sauce later.
- The beefsteak cutNo cut is named, which in this period usually meant round or a similar working muscle — the pounding is the giveaway, since tender steak needs none. Round or chuck steak, cut into serving pieces, behaves as the recipe expects; the brief simmer in water, onions and peppers is a short braise, and ten to fifteen minutes suits it better than "a few."
- Spanish Rice without tomatoThis is not the tomato-red rice most readers expect. It is parboiled rice drained and then fried hard in oil with onions and chiles until deeply browned, which does take a good twenty minutes over medium heat and must be stirred or it scorches. Half a cup of raw rice yields a side dish for two.
- YieldThe book gives none. As written, each recipe suits two to four people; the eggs and the rice both scale up easily if you move to a wider pan so the layer stays shallow.
These recipes come from Clarence Edwords's Bohemian San Francisco (1914), a book written in the shadow of the 1906 earthquake and fire, when the city's restaurant culture was being memorialized as much as described. Edwords opens not with the bohemians but with the Californio ranchos, and he credits his recipes to a descendant of Senora Benicia Vallejo — Francisca Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo, wife of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo of Sonoma, and the namesake of the town of Benicia. The chapter's picture of the "days before the Gringo came," all open tables and coins left out for departing guests, is Anglo nostalgia of a familiar Californian kind, written by people who had displaced the families they were praising; the recipes themselves are more reliable evidence than the prose around them. What they record is a domestic kitchen built on fresh green chiles, onions, olive oil and canned tomatoes, and the last of those is worth noticing: by 1914 the commercially canned tomato had become so ordinary that even a dish presented as an heirloom secret begins by opening a tin.