San Francisco Stories: Gold, Cattle and Food

By Jean Doolittle Henry

My family immigrated to San Francisco in 1849 and 1850. They were pioneer entrepreneurs, miners, grocers, cartographers, soldiers, cattle barons, judges, and feminists. By the 1880s they were wealthy, and the city was booming. They lived well, and their meals reflected this, their heritage, and the Edwardian manner. Tastes eventually changed. However, this food and style survived in our family into the 1950s.
My maternal grandmother, Emma, and her sister, Henrietta, lived in a lovely white house on Clay Street. Money from large cattle ranches and an abattoir allowed them to live and eat well. They had one of the “best tables” in town, and entertained graciously. Their family came from good New England stock and Irish immigrants.
My father’s family came from the East Coast as seamen, soldiers, and surveyors. They became gold miners, grocers, and entrepreneurs, living in San Francisco and in Belvedere, Marin County, in large houses with servants, horses, and style. They lived the grand gesture.
Recipes are embedded in the narratives of this story, reflecting the Edwardian—rather French—preparation of food, as well as the frugality of New England. Whether ample party food or simple home food, it was delicious—due to the fabulous produce available from the bays, ocean, valleys, and foothills of California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781495187797

Book preview

Introduction: History and a Few Recipes

What is a memoir, if not collective memories: those of oneself in a matrix of being. Of being of and belonging to a land, an ethos, and a web of personalities.

It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else’s memory, stories handed down on the family network. – Joan Didion

Many memoirs are I memoirs, pictures refracted through one personality. What I have for the reader is a we collection of memorabilia: a time, a place and a family with a rather postured, but romantic, Edwardian view of life. Think if you will of the movies: Babbette’s Feast, where a Norwegian household is changed by the addition of a French cook, or Fanny and Alexander, the Bergman film of his Edwardian childhood. Perhaps, I wanted to remember the positive. The best things in our family happened over food, marvelously prepared food.

As the recipes and the remembrances flowed from the recipe books, pictures, letters and memory, thoughts rose from some subterranean, subconscious source: the memorabilia, the food, the people had a connection to the land which most of us have lost. They may have lived in cities, but they were aware of their place in the universe, that they, as Homo sapiens, were not alone, but were part of an ecosystem (they would never have used this word). They were not avid churchgoers, but Deists by nature. They believed in the natural world and in the Divine, which to them were unalterably connected; how could anybody not be when standing on a mountain in the Sierras or shooting a magnificent twelve-point buck in the tawny California hills? I think Father, taught by Native Americans to hunt, quite naturally absorbed Native American ideas about the hunter and hunted. Their living came from the land and they reveled in it.

Facing west from California’s shores,

Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,

Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled…

– Walt Whitman

In our family it wasn’t sex that kept the family together, it wasn’t music, it wasn’t even books, although books were important: it was food. The table was the altar where we worshipped. Food was love and love for food was love. Why? Because good food was the one thing we agreed upon. Mother, or it could have been Father, said that there were two kinds of people: the first kind ate to live, and the second lived to eat. We were the second kind.

My family, especially my father after he returned from three years overseas during the Second World War, considered Alta California paradisiacal. From December of 1944, when he returned with German contraband French wines from Paris, Father never left to go anywhere else but Baha California. After all, Baja California is really California, and he only went there once a year to fish and to hunt for food for the table. We, as children, had not experienced places outside California other than through our reading; we thought the whole world to be like our Northern California world.

In a sixteenth-century novel by Ordóñez de Montalvo there was an island called California, on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Earthly Paradise. This land, this climatic and food paradise was ours: we revered the production of native foods for the table, whether eating beef and lamb from the family’s ranches and abattoirs or hunting and fishing game or gathering produce from California’s bounty. We, as a family, were tempered by California and our relationship to the land.

When my mother died in 1989 I inherited her cookbooks. Among them were my Great Aunt Henrietta’s recipes. As Henrietta was what used to be called a maiden lady, and a rich one at that, she did not concern herself with many of the mundane details of life. She had the time and the leisure to indulge herself in many of the pleasantries of a Victorian lady. Thus the cookbook is largely a collection of outrageously delectable recipes for teas, card parties, ladies luncheons, debutante parties and black tie dinners for family holidays which were always held at home (it was considered sinful to eat out)—Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays, christenings, funerals, weddings, game dinners after every conceivable hunting or fishing season: duck, deer, dove, quail, salmon, pheasant. Henrietta’s recipes were handed down to her by generations of cooks, many from her New England and English forebears of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many from her San Francisco friends.

It occurred to me that some of Henrietta’s recipes and her life in San Francisco seen from a culinary viewpoint might be a very satisfactory way to begin writing a memoir: life portrayed through recipes; that it is good in our frenetic, streamlined times to not only contemplate the calories and sumptuousness of the Victorian culinary creation, but perhaps to partake of it. There is something about butterfat that soothes the soul as it lines the digestive tract and, if not overdone, might even enlarge and lengthen our lives as we sit a bit to savor the savories. One can rush about while eating a McDonald’s hamburger or a taco and beer, but zabaglione with raspberries or New England Summer Berry Pudding deserve better and if we stop to gather the berries, our lives slow even more. Time becomes multidimensional; a glance in the woods softens city stares and builds memories to dream on. And who knows where the glance might lead? To a lifesaving spiritual awakening while berry hunting? Aunt Henrietta would have been pleased.

The following recipe is called Summer Pudding in Scotland and England today. It is an ancient recipe for a summer day. Wild blackberries and raspberries are special after a walk in the woods in July to gather them. Try it with your friends. I promise it will elicit memories.

Additions to original recipes are in parentheses.

Adrianna’s New England Berry and Bread and Butter Pudding

(Adrianna was Henrietta’s mother)

INGREDIENTS:

canned or fresh berries crushed with a little sugar (about 2 quarts very ripe berries and about 1 cup of sugar)

thick slices homemade type white bread (1 loaf or 1 pound)

butter

cream

(extra berries)

DIRECTIONS:

Heat canned or fresh berries. (Mash berries with sugar. Save a few for garnish.) Put in a baking dish or, for a more elegant dessert, on the bottom of a Bundt pan. Butter medium thick slices of bread, dip in the berry juice and put on top of the berries. Pour more berries on top of the bread and either alternate in the baking dish or press around the bottom and sides of the Bundt pan until filled. There should be just enough bread to absorb all the moisture and be thoroughly saturated in the juice. Refrigerate until cold. Unmold.

Try picking wild blackberries or raspberries for this recipe, or use domestic strawberries. Guests from Great Britain at our farm in Pennsylvania picked black raspberries and followed the recipe above. They weighted the berry-soaked bread by putting a plate with a weight on top of the mixture. Garnish with berries and serve with cream, whipped cream or ice cream.

A milk and cream memory from San Francisco: milk was delivered in glass containers by Borden’s Dairy in San Francisco. The containers were figure-eight shaped, with the tops smaller than the bottoms. The cream would rise to the top from the lighter milk, and this could be used in the morning for morning coffee and fruit and cereal, or later in the day for richer dessert dishes.

Emma McLaughlin’s Zabaglione

(Emma was Aunt Henrietta’s sister and my grandmother)

INGREDIENTS:

1 egg yolk for each person

2 tsp. sugar for each person

½ eggshell of sherry for each person

½ eggshell of rum for each person (or 2 tbsp. Grand Marnier instead of rum and sherry)

(grated rind of ½ lemon)

2 tbsp. whipped cream for every egg yolk

DIRECTIONS:

Beat egg yolks until creamy, thick and lemon colored. Add sugar slowly to the egg mixture, beating all the time. Then add liquor slowly stirring all the time. (Add grated lemon rind.) Put into a double boiler. Don’t let the water boil. Stir all the time. Take the mixture off to cool after it thickens a bit and sticks to a spoon. Put ice in the bottom of the boiler to cool. When cool, beat in 2 tbsp. whipped cream for every egg yolk. Or you can use the beaten whites of the eggs.

1. Dinners in San Francisco: 3575 Clay Street

Henrietta was born in 1878 and died in 1966. Her life spanned the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Europe, the development of the West in the United States, a long stretch of world peace during her youth, and a time of austerity during the Second World War. But Henrietta lived most of her life in a time of prosperity and hope, of celebration of food, friends and the bounty of the West.

The West was coming of age, and the wealth fostered by the land was reflected in the home. Gold, silver, cattle, huge food cartels and import and export businesses made Californians wealthy and, as Californians were quick to tell other U.S. citizens, they financed the Civil War for the Union. The distractions of today—television, movies, computers, and the myriad of other current entertainments—were not available. Meals were eaten out only in friends’ homes or in clubs, the latter primarily for men. Clubs for ladies—The Francesca Club, The Town and Country Club, the Women’s Athletic Club (now The Metropolitan Club)—came later for women to have a place to relax, eat and meet friends. Californians celebrated their status in their clothes, their homes and in the accoutrements of daily living, especially their food. Probably nowhere in the world at this time was the variety of fresh food so abundantly available and the diversity of preparations so accessible.

The Spanish left an indelible mark on California food and culture. As they marched up the coast into Alta California they brought foods, recipes and hospitality from both the New and Old Worlds: almonds, pecans, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, artichokes, avocados, corn, and beans, and recipes from the hacienda and vaquero culture. To California, New Englanders brought recipes and seeds and cuttings from their orchards, farm and garden plots. The Chinese railroad workers, miners, and cooks on the ranches and in the households on Pacific Heights brought a variety of teas, ginger, soy sauce and other exotic spices and condiments. Later, the Japanese came and added rice and ginger vinegars, as well as their facility as farmers to grow the biggest and best strawberries, raspberries, plums, peaches and pears in the Salinas and San Joaquin Valleys.

From the earliest days of Spanish settlement, good wines were available as imports and from the coastal valleys. The seas, lakes and streams were rich in fish and shellfish. The sluices of San Francisco Bay and the tule and rice fields in the Great Central Valley were covered with wild fowl during spring and fall migrations. The coastal range was plentiful with mule deer. Ranches supplied fattened beef, lamb, more fruits and vegetables, wild pheasant, quail, partridge, dove, trout and salmon. Meals and recipes ran the gamut from simple fare using recipes from New England, such as boiled cod and summer berry pudding for supper, to elaborate Continental cuisine presented in six or seven courses for a grand party. William Tell Coleman, the leader of the Vigilante movement in California in the 1850s, held an Edwardian celebration of seven courses in 1875 in his San Francisco home for a party of twenty.

California was not isolated. Seagoing ships had plied the coast from the early Spanish days and later sailed the New England, China and South Sea Islands trade routes. Immigration during the gold rush and the advent of the railroad in 1869 brought the West closer to the rest of the United States. Added to New England recipes were recipes from England and France. As early as 1859, Richard Henry Dana, in an epilogue to Two Years Before the Mast, wrote:

It is noticeable that European continental fashions prevail generally in this city, French cooking, lunch at noon, and dinner at the end of the day, with cafe noir after meals, and to a great extent the European Sunday, to all which emigrants from the United States and Great Britain seem to adapt themselves. Some dinners…at French restaurants were, it seemed to me…as sumptuous and as good, in dishes and wines, as I have found in Paris.

There was also a kind of King Edward mania after the English prince’s popular visit as Lord Renfrew to the United States and Canada in 1860. The cooking of the wealthy reflected his fondness for the grand gesture in food, service, conversation and wines. English recipes and cookbooks circulated. and their inclusion of French sauces and soups brought more European cuisine to California.

By the early 1900s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, the culinary bible of our family, sometimes known as the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, was in vogue. Six-hundred-and-forty-eight pages long, it included, in addition to recipes: Food: a description of food groups and chemical analyses of each group and the effect on the body; Cookery: the scientific analysis of and timetable for each method of preparing and preserving food—larding, boning, breading, salting, canning, drying, pickling, smoking, evaporation and antiseptics; Helpful Hints for the Young Housekeeper: sample table services, food combinations and menus for ordinary breakfasts, luncheons, dinners and for celebratory occasions, such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, and other formal dinner parties. The A Full Course Dinner menu had twelve courses! For a simpler dinner, the third, seventh, eighth and tenth courses, and the game in the ninth course may be omitted. This leaves seven courses for a simpler dinner—with wines served at each course! According to Emma, Henrietta’s sister and my grandmother:

And these great banquets of ten courses—after the earthquake (1906) and after the First World War social life was simplified. And a great many well-to-do people had left San Francisco for New York. I think that all affected the formalities.¹

All the sample breakfasts in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book include fruit, cereal with sugar and cream, meat or eggs, breads and coffee. The luncheons all include something hot: creamed chicken or beef, croquettes, soups, and breads, desserts and fruits. The dinners include soups, meats, at least two, often three vegetables, and rather complicated desserts. The menus and recipes are full of eggs, butter and meats with no regard to cholesterol. Yet most of my aunt’s family and that of my father lived rather long natural lives. (The few men who died early, died in the gold fields, on unseaworthy ships or from a disease such as tuberculosis.)

The food at my Aunt Henrietta and Grandmother Emma’s household was patterned on the Fanny Farmer ideas of science, health and good food, with some California variations. A few soups were served at luncheon parties or for Sunday suppers, but, in most cases, fresh salads were more prominent as a first course. Vegetables were fresh and quickly cooked and refreshed in the French way, rather than the New England way of overcooking them, the difference probably being the preponderance of fresh vegetables year round rather than canned or preserved ones. Fruits were served in season. In Emma’s childhood years, some fruit in season was canned and preserved for the winter, with all the women in the household helping. By the 1930s fruit was available all year round and canned fruit was used sparingly.

In addition to Fanny Farmer, the Chinese cook used recipes from