Vintage California Cuisine

A selection of 300 recipes from the first cookbooks published in California show how culinary influences from around the world converged in the Golden State in the decades after the Gold Rush.

California cuisine became an international culinary phenomenon in the 1970s, emphasizing fresh, seasonal ingredients, in combinations inspired by a diverse array of ethnic traditions. Vintage California Cuisine, with a selection of 300 recipes reprinted from 13 of the first cookbooks published in the state, shows how the pieces of that culinary puzzle began to emerge more than a century ago. The recipes include: Walnut Catsup and Grape Pickles from the first California cookbook, How to Keep a Husband, published in 1872; Oyster Croquettes and Cherry Chutney from What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, published in San Francisco in 1881 by a former slave; Fig Marmalade and Quail a la Spanish from Santa Barbara Recipes, published in 1888; Clayton's Celebrated California Salad Dressing, from an 1884 cookbook by an entrepreneurial San Francisco caterer, who was the first to recognize that California was worthy of cuisine that it could call its ownThe ; Two dozen recipes translated from El Cocinero Espanol, a Spanish language cookbook published in 1898, which revealed the richness of the state's Spanish and Mexican heritage; and more than three dozen recipes from two early vegetarian cookbooks. Many of these recipes are reprinted here for the first time since they originally appeared. Vintage California Cuisine brings them all together in one volume for the first time ever.

Mark Thompson writes about law, history and food, among other topics. American Character, his biography of Charles Lummis, an Indian rights activist who lived in California and the Southwest from the 1880s through the 1920s, was honored by Western Writers of America in 2002 with a Spur Award for best biography. His second book, Vintage California Cuisine, traces the origins of the state's unique culinary sensibility to the earliest cookbooks published in California. Thompson, who currently resides in Philadelphia, also publishes a web site called SeasonalChef.com, about farmers markets and seasonal produce. He has written for dozens of publications including the Atlantic, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times.