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Sang the Swan Song: Coppa (part 2 of 3)
It was Bohemia's Swan Song, sung by those to whom San Francisco held more than pleasure-more than sentimentality. It held for them close-knit ties that nothing less than a world-shaking cataclysm could severand the cataclysm had arrived. The old Coppa restaurant in Montgomery street became a memory and on its ashes came the new one, located in Pine street between Montgomery and Kearny streets, and for a number of years this remained the idol of Bohemia until changed conditions drove the tide of patronage far up toward Powell, Ellis, Eddy and THE SWAN O'Farrell streets. At that time there SANG SONG grew up a mushroom crop of socalled restaurants in Columbus avenue close to Barbary Coast such as Caesar's, the Follies Cabaret, Jupiter and El Paradiso, where space was reserved in the middle of the floor for dancing. Coppa emulated the new idea by fitting out a gorgeous basement room at the corner of Kearny and Jackson, which he called the Neptune Palace. It represented a great grotto under the ocean, and here throngs gathered nightly to dance and eat until the police commissioners closed all of these resorts. as well as Barbary Coast.
Coppa became financially injured by this venture and was forced to take a partner in his old restaurant, and finally gave up his share and went beyond the city limits and opened the Pompeiian Garden, on the San Mateo road, and there with his heroic little wife tried to rebuild his shrunken fortunes, leaving the historic restaurant with its string of black cats and its memorable pictures on the walls to less skilled hands. He struggled against hard times and at the time of this writing he, with his wife, their son and his wife, are giving the old-time dinners and trying to make the venture a success.
Coppa's chicken baked inside a coconut is workable in a modern kitchen, but the original assumes you know how to open a coconut, seal it, and judge a wood-fired oven. A few specifics make the difference.
- The hinge: seal and vesselEverything depends on the coconut staying shut, so the steam and aroma stay inside. The "paste" is a luting paste of flour and water worked into a stiff dough and pressed all around the joint between shell and lid; it is not eaten. Choose a heavy brown coconut with no cracks and no sloshing sound, saw the top off cleanly with a serrated knife or fine-tooth saw, and drain and reserve the water before scraping out the meat.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "set in the oven, well heated", with no figure. A moderately hot modern oven, somewhere in the region of 375-400F, is a reasonable equivalent. The pan of water the recipe calls for appears to serve to keep the shell from scorching and to hold humidity; keep it topped up over the hour.
- BastingYou are basting the outside of the coconut, not the chicken: the recipe says the basting is to prevent the coconut burning. Spooning water or oil over the shell every quarter hour or so keeps it from charring.
- Spring chickenA spring chicken was a young bird of about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb. A modern 4 lb supermarket chicken will not fit in one coconut and will not cook through in an hour that way. Use a small poussin or a 2 lb broiler cut in four, or bone the thighs and breast and use pieces.
- DonenessAn hour sealed at 375-400F should carry small bone-in pieces past 165F in the thigh, but the coconut hides everything. Check with an instant-read thermometer as soon as you lift the lid and return it to the oven if the chicken is short.
- Green corn"Fresh, green corn" is ordinary sweet corn at the milk stage, cut from the cob raw. Two ears give roughly one to one and a half cups of kernels. Frozen kernels work but give up the starchy milk that helps bind the filling.
- Straining the sauceThe tomato-onion-pepper mixture is strained so only the thickened liquid goes in with the corn and coconut. If you would rather keep the body, press the solids through a coarse sieve instead of discarding them; a fine strainer leaves you with very little.
- YieldOne coconut is a generous single serving or a modest dish for two. Scale by making one coconut per one or two diners rather than by enlarging the bird.
This comes from Clarence Edwords's Bohemian San Francisco (1914), a book written to record the restaurant culture that the earthquake and fire of April 1906 had already broken apart. Giuseppe Coppa's place on Montgomery Street, with its black cats painted around the cornice and verses scrawled on the walls by the writers and illustrators who drank there, was the emblem of that scene; the chapter is frank that the version Edwords found afterward, out on the San Mateo road, was a survival rather than a revival. The dish's name points to the Portola Festival, the civic celebration first held in 1909 in honour of Gaspar de Portolá, whose party is credited with the European sighting of San Francisco Bay in 1769 - a burst of civic pageantry that announced the city had rebuilt, and a fashionable thing to name a dish after in the years just following. Cooking food sealed in its own shell or crock, luted shut with flour paste, is much older than the festival and shows up across European and Asian cookery; what is local here is the "Dago red" the same pages mention - the cheap Italian table wine of North Beach, named with a slur that was unremarkable in print at the time.