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Bohemia of the Present: Lazzarini
One of the little, out-of-the way restaurants of the Italian quarter is the Leon d'Oro, at 1525 Grant avenue, and it is one of the surprises of that district. Lazzarini, he with the big voice, presides over the tiny kitchen in the rear of the room devoted to public service and family affairs. Soft-voiced Rita, with her demure air and her resemblance to Evangeline, with her crossed apron strings and delicate features, takes your order, and soon comes the booming sound from the neighborhood of the range, that announces to all patrons, as well as to some who may be in the vicinity on the street, that your order is ready, and then everybody knows what you are eating. As you sit, either in curtained alcove or at the common table in the main room, little Andrea will visit you with his cat. Both are institutions of the place and one is prone to wonder how a cat can have so much patience with a little boy. Andrea speaks Italian so fluently and so rapidly that it gives you the impression of a quick rushing stream of pure water, tumbling over the stones of a steep declivity. He is not yet old enough to understand that it is not everybody who knows how to speak Italian, but that makes not the slightest difference with him, for he talks without ever expecting an answer.
Lazzarini understands the art and science of cooking, and some of the dishes he prepares are so unusual that one goes again and again to partake of them: Possibly his best dish is the following: Cut a spring chicken into pieces. Place these in a pan containing hot olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Turn the chicken until it is thoroughly browned, and add finely chopped green peppers. Let it cook awhile then add a finely chopped clove of garlic and a little sage. Put in a CHICKEN A LA LEON D'ORO small glass of Marsala wine, tomato sauce and French mushrooms and let simmer for ten minutes. Before taking from the pan add half a tablespoonful of butter and serve on a hot plate.
Lazzarini also makes a specialty of snails, and they are well worth trying while you are experimenting with the unusual things to eat. The recipe for these is as follows:
SNAILS A LA BORDELAISE Put ten pounds of snails in a covered barrel and keep for ten days. Then put in a tub with a handful of salt and a quarter of a gallon of vinegar. Stir for twenty minutes until a foam rises, then take out and wash thoroughly until the water runs clear. Put in a large pot a pint of virgin olive oil, four large onions and eight cloves of garlic, all chopped fine, and a small bunch of parsley, chopped fine. Put the pot over the fire and when the onions are browned stir in some white wine or Marsala and then put in the snails. Cover and let simmer for thirty-five minutes. While cooking add a pint of meat stock, a little butter and some anise seed. When done put in a soup tureen and serve. To remove the snails use small wooden toothpicks.
Two dishes are buried in Edwords's sketch of the Leon d'Oro: a pan-fried chicken with peppers and Marsala, and a Bordelaise-style snail stew that begins ten days before dinner. The chicken is straightforward; the snails need rethinking rather than translating.
- Spring chickenA spring chicken in 1914 was a young bird of roughly 2 to 2½ lb dressed, cut into eight or ten pieces. A modern cut-up fryer works, but a 3½ lb supermarket chicken has heavier pieces and will need longer than the recipe allows.
- The chicken's real timingTen minutes of simmering after browning will not cook bone-in thighs and legs through. Brown the pieces well in the oil, then expect 25 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering in the wine and tomato, covered, until the thigh joint reads 175F. The written ten minutes assumes a much smaller bird and a longer initial fry.
- Small glass of MarsalaThe old cookbook measure of a wineglassful was reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so a "small glass" is probably in the region of ¼ cup. Dry Marsala suits the garlic and sage better than sweet.
- French mushroomsThese are canned or bottled champignons, drained and added at the end so they only warm through. Fresh cremini can stand in, but they release liquid and want a few minutes of their own in the pan first.
- Tomato sauceNot the seasoned jarred sauce sold today. He means a plain cooked tomato purée, closer to passata; about ½ cup for one chicken. The finishing butter, stirred in off the heat, is what binds it into a sauce.
- Purging live snailsThe barrel and the salt-and-vinegar scrub are the traditional purge for wild-gathered snails, which must be fasted before cooking to clear the gut. Ten days sealed in a barrel will also kill a fair number of them; any snail that is not visibly alive and retracting before the salting is discarded, not cooked.
- Wild snails todayLand snails are intermediate hosts for rat lungworm and other parasites, and garden snails may carry molluscicide residue. If you want this dish, start from tinned Helix pomatia or Helix aspersa, drained and rinsed. Ten pounds of live snails in the shell is a very large batch — several hundred animals — so scale down to whatever number of tinned snails you actually want to serve and reduce the other quantities to match.
- Quarter of a gallonThat is 1 quart of vinegar for the scrubbing tub, not for the pot. Likewise the pint of olive oil suits 10 lb of snails in the shell; scale it down hard for tinned snails or the tureen arrives as a bowl of oil.
- Anise seedAdded late, and easy to overdo — a scant teaspoon for the full batch. It is the detail that separates this from the butter-and-garlic escargot most people know, and it points to the Provençal and Ligurian side of the tradition rather than the Bordeaux one the name claims.
This comes from Clarence Edwords's Bohemian San Francisco (1914), a guide to the eating houses of a city rebuilt after 1906 and still full of small immigrant kitchens where a proprietor cooked and a family served. Grant Avenue above Broadway was the spine of the North Beach Italian quarter, and the Leon d'Oro — the Golden Lion — was exactly the sort of one-room place Edwords made his subject: no menu worth printing, a range in the back, and a dish or two the cook did better than anyone. Snails were a genuine local commodity rather than an affectation; the brown garden snail, Helix aspersa, had been introduced to California in the nineteenth century and was gathered from Bay Area gardens and hillsides by Italian and French households, which is why a small restaurant could speak casually of ten pounds of them. The name à la bordelaise is generally used loosely in this period for snails cooked with wine, garlic and parsley, and Lazzarini's version, with its Marsala and anise seed, owes more to Italy than to Bordeaux.