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Fish in Their Variety: Grotto
At the Gianduja at Union and Stockton streets, one is certain to get fish cooked well and that it is perfectly fresh. The variety is not so good as at the Shell Fish Grotto, but otherwise it is just as good in every respect. At the Grotto there is a wonderful variety but the quantity is at the minimum because there, too, they will have no fish that has been twenty-four hours out of the water.
One wonders how a full course dinner entirely of fish can be prepared, but if you will go to the Shell Fish Grotto you will find that it is done, and done well at that. Here you can get a good dinner for one dollar, or if you prefer it they have a Fish Dinner de Luxe for which they charge two dollars. Both are good, the latter having additional wines and delicacies. Down in Washington street, just off Columbus avenue, is the Vesuvius, an Italian restaurant of low price, but excellent cooking. A specialty there is fish which is always brought fresh from the nearby Clay street market as ordered, consequently is perfect. When you give your order a messenger is dispatched to the market and usually he brings the fish alive and the chef prepares it in one of his many ways, for he is said to have more secrets about the cooking of fish than one would think it possible for one brain to contain. The trouble about this restaurant is that the rest of the menu does not come up to the fish standard, but if you desire a simple luncheon of fish there is no better place to get it.
There are three things in which an Easterner will be disappointed in San Francisco, and these are oysters. Pacific Coast oysters fail in size, flavor and cooking, when compared with the luscious bivalve of the Atlantic, so far as the ordinary forms of preparation is concerned. Even fancy dishes, such as Oysters Kirkpatrick, would be better if made of the eastern oyster, not what they call the eastern oyster here, for that is a misnomer, but the oysters that grow in the Atlantic Ocean.
Of the Pacific oysters the best is the Toke Point, that comes from Oregon. They are similar in size to the Blue Point, but lack the flavor. When, in a San Francisco restaurant, you are asked what sort of oyster you will have, and you see the familiar names on the menu card, remember that these are transplanted oysters, and have lost much of their flavor in the transplanting, or else they are oysters that have been shipped across the continent and have thereby lost their freshness.
The California oyster proper, is very small, and it has a peculiar coppery taste, which bon vivants declare adds to its piquancy. Instead of ordering these by the dozen you order them by the hundred, it being no difficult task to eat an hundred at a meal, especially when prepared in a pepper roast.
Everyone knows the staple ways of preparing oysters, and every chef looks upon the oyster as the source of new flavors in many dishes, but to our mind the best way we have found in San Francisco was at a little restaurant down in Washington street before the fire. It was the Buon Gusto. where they served fish and oysters better than anything else because the owners were the chefs, and they were from the island of Catalan, off the coast of Italy. Their specialty was called "Oysters a la Catalan," and their recipe, which is given, can be prepared excellently in a chafing dish:
OYSTERS A LA CATALAN Take one tablespoonful of butter, two teaspoonfuls grated Edam or Parmesan cheese, four tablespoonfuls catsup, onehalf teaspoonful Worcestershire sauce, two tablespoonfuls cream, meat of one good-sized crab cut fine and two dozen oysters. Put the cheese and butter into a double boiler and when melted smooth add the catsup and Worcestershire sauce. Mix well and add the cream and then the crab meat. When creamy and boiling hot drop in the oysters. As soon as the oysters are crinkled serve on hot buttered toast on hot plates. In the days before the fire when you went to a restaurant and ordered fish or oysters the waiter invariably put before you either a plate of crab salad or a dish of shrimps, with which you were supposed to amuse yourself while the meal was being prepared.
Shrimps and crabs were then so plentiful that their price was never considered. Under our new conditions these always appear on the bill when ordered, and if they be not ordered they do not appear for they now are made to increase the income.
To the uninitated visitor the shrimps so served were always something of a mystery, and after a few futile efforts to get at the meat they generally gave it up as too much work for the little good derived. The Old Timer, however, cracked the shrimp's neck, pinched its tail, and out popped a delicious bonne bouche which added to the joy of the meal and increased the appetite. But there are many other ways of serving shrimps, and they are also much used to give flavor to certain fish sauces. One of the most delicious ways of preparing shrimp is what is known as "Shrimp Creole, a la Antoine," so named after the famous New Orleans Antoine by a chef in San Francisco who had regard for the New Orleans caterer. We doubt if it can be had anywhere in San Francisco now unless you are well enough known to have it prepared according to the recipe. This recipe, by the way, is a good one to use in a chafing dish supper. This is the way it was prepared at the old Pup restaurant, one of the noted restaurants before the fire and earthquake changed conditions:
SHRIMP CREOLE Take three pints of unshelled shrimps and shell them, one-half pint of cream, two tablespoonfuls of butter, two tablespoonfuls of flour, two tablespoonfuls of catsup, one wine glass of sherry, paprika, chili powder and parsley. Brown the flour in the butter and add the milk until it is thickened. Color with the catsup and season with paprika and chili powder. Stir in the sherry and make a pink cream which is to be mixed through the shrimps and not cooked. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve with squares of toast or crackers.
When is a lobster not a lobster? When it is a crayfish. This question and answer might well go into the primer of information for those who
Two working recipes sit inside this restaurant tour: Oysters a la Catalan and Shrimp Creole a la Antoine, both written for a chafing dish at the table. Neither gives quantities for serving, and both assume a pantry of 1914 staples.
- The hinge: oysters cook in seconds"As soon as the oysters are crinkled" means the edges have just ruffled, which takes one to two minutes in hot sauce. Held longer they shrink and turn to rubber, and they will also thin the sauce with their liquor.
- Shrimp Creole is an assembly, not a cook"Mixed through the shrimps and not cooked" tells you the shrimp go in already cooked. San Francisco bay shrimp were commonly sold boiled in the shell by the pint, so the shelling called for here was most likely picking cooked shrimp rather than raw ones. A warm sauce will not cook raw shrimp through; poach them separately first if that is all you can buy.
- Cream or milkThe Shrimp Creole lists half a pint of cream and then tells you to add "the milk." Use the cream, added a little at a time to the browned flour and butter, and expect a sauce about the thickness of a thin bechamel.
- A wine glass of sherryIn American recipes of this era a wine glass is about two fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry, or the pink sauce turns cloying.
- Catsup then and nowCommercial catsup around 1914 was generally thinner and sharper with vinegar and spice, and likely less sweet than today's tomato ketchup. Four tablespoonfuls of a modern brand will push the oyster dish sweet; cut it back, or substitute a spoon of tomato paste with a splash of vinegar.
- Edam or Parmesan in a double boilerKeep the water below a simmer, since cheese melted over direct or boiling heat will break and go stringy before the catsup goes in.
- Crab"One good-sized crab" means a Dungeness, which yields roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of picked meat. Use picked lump or leg meat and fold it in at the end so it does not shred.
- YieldTwo dozen oysters plus a crab on toast serves four as a light supper course, or two generously. Three pints of unshelled shrimp will shell down to well under half that volume -- somewhere between half a pound and a pound of meat depending on their size -- again about four servings.
These pages come from Clarence E. Edwords's Bohemian San Francisco (1914), a book written in the long shadow of the 1906 earthquake and fire, which is why so much of it is phrased as "before the fire" and "under our new conditions." Edwords is cataloguing restaurants that had vanished or changed hands, and the recipes are salvage work: dishes he had eaten at the Buon Gusto and the old Pup, set down so a reader could reproduce them in a chafing dish at home. The oyster complaint is genuine period detail. The tiny coppery native he calls "the California oyster proper" is the Olympia, Ostrea lurida, historically eaten by the hundred in San Francisco; the "Blue Point" and "eastern" oysters on local menus were Atlantic stock transplanted to Pacific beds, and the Toke Point came from Willapa Bay in Washington rather than Oregon as he has it. His "island of Catalan, off the coast of Italy" is a muddle of Catalonia and someone's home village, of the kind common when a writer takes a cook's word at the table.