Searching for the First California Cuisine

Words by Richard Foss

The ancient Sumerians left behind tens of thousands of clay tablets that represent not only the largest accumulation of information in the ancient world, but the most boring. Over ninety percent of the tablets that have been translated are lists of goods exchanged or taxes collected, and most of the remainder are arcane religious texts whose meaning and significance will cause arguments among those scholars that they  do not put to sleep. When a translator finds one that is different, perhaps a collection of proverbs that contain details of everyday life, I imagine them weeping tears of joy.

It might seem odd for a scholar of a much more recent period, namely California between 1799 and 1845, to feel a kinship with those who try to pierce millennia rather than mere centuries. Nevertheless, those interested in cooking and foodways from the Spanish and Mexican Southwest find that despite a huge trove of documents, very little related to cooking and dining has survived.

This is especially frustrating because Californians during the early 1800’s had a diet unlike almost any other in history. Foods that were luxuries in the rest of the world were cheap here, and foods that were staples for the poor elsewhere were expensive or entirely unavailable. This was a consequence of the fact that the economy of California was based on exporting hides and tallow processed from vast herds of cattle. The market for meat from those herds was much smaller, the cost of transport high, and preservation was limited to drying it to jerky or salting it to resupply sailing vessels. The fresh beef that was a luxury meal in the rest of North America was often left to rot because nobody wanted it (1).

On the other hand fresh fish, which were cheap almost anywhere else near an ocean, were almost entirely unavailable in Spanish and Mexican California because there were no fishing fleets. There was no enclosed harbor between the tiny settlements in San Diego and San Francisco, and fresh seafood wouldn’t have survived any long wagon trip in the California heat. As Catholics had to eat fish on Fridays, those who didn’t live near a lake or year-round stream might have to settle for dried codfish that had made the trip from the Atlantic.

This rough sketch by Swedish gentleman traveler G.M. Waseurtz is the only known drawing from life of a Californio kitchen. It was drawn in 1842 or 1843 and published in “The King’s Orphan: Drawings of an Early Swedish Explorer to California.” No online edition found. Image courtesy Los Angeles Public Library Special Collections.

The overlapping bureaucracies of the missions and presidios produced voluminous records, some of it devoted to squabbles about how much of the produce from the mission farms should be allocated to hungry and underpaid soldiers. Those local officials had no reason to remark about what was done with it after it was delivered, so they didn’t. If it wasn’t for the occasional report of a cook punished for stealing government rations, we might suppose they didn’t have any.

So where might we begin to seek details of this odd cuisine? Reports by foreigners are often the most valuable documents in culinary history, because the things that are reported tell us about the expectations of the author. When we read the astonishment of a French traveler to Elizabethan England who reported that common servants enjoyed butter and cheese daily and “the taste of meat several times a week,” it tells us something about both cultures.

The natural productivity of the California land was much remarked upon by visitors, many of whom were merchants or military men who valued the information for commercial or strategic reasons. Like their Spanish counterparts, they cared less about what the current owners were doing with their crops once they were picked. Even otherwise acute observers became strangely mute when it came to the details of meals. As an example, when Captain George Vancouver visited Mission Santa Clara in November of 1792, he mentioned that peaches, apricots, apples, pears, figs, and grapevines were all producing. The harvests of wheat were so reliable and abundant that the less esteemed but hardier oats and barley were not planted. Vancouver notes the inefficient methods of threshing and milling available, and describes the grain storage buildings. He then gives a detailed description of the way in which twenty-two head of cattle were roped and slaughtered for a dinner in honor of him and his six companions. And then, after pages of acute and detailed observations of everything else in his environment, he describes the dinner as follows: “In the convent, a most excellent and abundant repast of the productions of the country was provided, which were in the greatest perfection” (2).

That’s it. The raw materials, (or at least some of them, for who knows what else he neglected to mention) are listed, but not the number of dishes or the beverages accompanying them. The cooking methods, spicing, style of service, any details of table manners and the interactions between monks, local dignitaries, and his party of foreign explorers, are also not noted (3).

Other visitors are scarcely more voluble, and almost all paid more attention to the terrible rations given to the Mission Indians than to the luxury items they as guests were offered.  In 1824 the Russian navigator Alexander von Kotzebue indignantly described a porridge given to natives as, “ordinary, and not very wholesome food, consisting of wheaten flour, maize, peas, and beans, mixed together and boiled into a thick soup.” On the same day, his description of his own dinner was simply “a great number of dishes, strongly seasoned with garlic and pepper, and plenty of tolerable wine of the Padre’s own vintage” (4).

This 1830 engraving by Edward Finden was an illustration to Alexander Forbes 1835 history of California and is probably the best known image of California vaqueros. Since neither Finden or Forbes actually bothered to visit California before publication, the authenticity of details is questionable. Image courtesy Los Angeles Public Library Special Collections.

Kotzebue, an avid ethnologist who showed great interest in native traditions and sympathy for their hardships under Spanish rule, showed disdain for their Spanish rulers. It may be that his low opinion of his hosts made him lack interest in recording the details of their hospitality.

Easily the most annoying account of a meal in early California is provided by Captain Frederick Beechey in 1826. After a lavishly detailed description of a native village and his welcome to a mission by a kind priest, he wrote, “I will not attempt to stimulate the appetite of my reader by enumerating the various exquisite dishes which successively smoked on the board of the generous priest, suffice it that there were many good ones, as the padres in California are careful to have their table well supplied at all times of year, and have an indulgence to eat meat even during the greater part of Lent, in consequence of the difficulty of procuring fish.” A sentence like this can cause a culinary historian to burst into tears, pour a large drink of something stronger than water, or both.

The one foreign traveler who gave eloquent descriptions of meals and hospitality was Richard Henry Dana Jr., in his famous travelogue Two Years Before The Mast. If you were trying to invent an observer for posterity you could hardly do better, as Dana was a talented writer who had been tutored by Ralph Waldo Emerson and studied at Harvard before he decided to enlist as a merchant seaman.  Dana spent over a year in California, learning fluent Spanish so he could communicate with locals, and gives perceptive descriptions of many aspects of life along the Pacific coast in 1835.

Unfortunately that acute observer had very little to observe, because he lived at all times as a common sailor and never revealed his advanced education to his Spanish hosts. As a result we have a vivid portrait of the lives of both foreign sailors in California and the impoverished class of society in which they moved, but only the briefest glimpses of the upper classes. We know about the free meals that every mission offered as hospitality to travelers, but nothing of their social superiors’ tables. There is a detailed description of one fiesta, but after pages of describing dances he finds indecently flirtatious, Dana mentions nothing about the food.  

If reports by foreigners are vague and bureaucrats’ records dry, where else might we look for the aesthetic experience of this cuisine? Diaries and memoirs can give great depth if authored by someone who appreciates the joys of the table; you can learn a lot about English cuisine from the diary of Samuel Pepys or Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Unfortunately no contemporary diary is known to survive from Spanish or Mexican California, so we have no such reference. Those memoirs that were written afterward by Spaniards and Mexicans focus on the tragedies of their lost land and status, not how they dined at home or entertained.

There are also no recipe books from the period, which is not much of a surprise because the literacy level in this society was low. An articulate writer would have opportunities for advancement that would vastly exceed the lowly job of cooking. For detailed information about how meals were planned and constructed we have few sources, all written much later and each with problems when it comes to credibility.

The primary source, in that it is the only one written by anyone who lived during the first half of the Nineteenth Century, was El Cocinero Español by Encarnacion Pinedo (5). Granted, Pinedo was born in 1848 when the country had already fallen to the Americans, but her family kept many of the old traditions long after the conquest. Her book was published in San Francisco in 1898, and, as it was written in Spanish, it was clearly intended for an audience that shared her Californio heritage.

So what’s wrong with it as a source? While most of it is undoubtedly original, Pinedo padded her book with recipes from other sources. This is by no means unique; the first cookbook published in America, “American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons in 1796, was liberally salted with recipes plagiarized from an English author of the previous decade. Simmons’ book is still a cornerstone of American cooking because among the original entries are the first recipes using cornmeal, cranberries, and other American ingredients. In the same way Pinedo’s book has some material that is original and valuable, but it can’t be taken as definitive about what was eaten in California during the Mexican and Spanish periods. Pinedo was writing a cookbook for her own day that included the old recipes, not a historical work.

The next work chronologically was Bertha Haffner Ginger’s 1914 “California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook” (6), a slender tome that includes some of the same items. The recipes are clearly written, but Ginger had only been in California for three years before writing it so must have gotten the material from some other source. She provided no information about this, so it’s impossible to know how authentic any of them are, but the book had an outsized influence in its day. As Pinedo’s book was written in Spanish and not translated into English for decades, this was the first book of California recipes that many Anglos saw.

The book that got a lot of attention to California cooking was “Early California Hospitality,” by Ana Begue de Packman (7). Packman provided a wealth of detailed information, almost all of it of questionable value for several reasons. First of all, the book was written in 1938, almost a full century after the end of the period it purports to document. Second, de Packman had multiple agendas; she owned a historic Spanish adobe that she turned into a museum and rented out for parties. Glamorizing California’s Hispanic heritage boosted admissions and promoted her catering business. She was an enthusiastic proponent of what later became known as the “Spanish fantasy past,” an idealized version of history in which noble and romantic settlers on the rancho held endless fiestas while happy Indians labored gratefully for pious monks. The vignettes of daily life throughout this book have cloyingly sentimental reminiscences of a life neither she nor anyone else alive in 1938 actually experienced.

As for the recipes, they are easier to follow than the ones from Pinedo or Ginger, and though they claim to all be traditional, this is impossible. One calls for baking powder, an ingredient not widely available until the mid-1860’s, though the recipe may have been an updated version of a traditional item. Early California Hospitality is far easier to cook from due to the use of standardized measurements, but it is not a reliable guide to how things were done in the era it claims to represent.  There are things we can learn from the book – it has the earliest description of burritos, and it preserves otherwise lost rhymes and chants of street food vendors – but we must be cautious about the antiquity and authenticity of specific recipes.

What then can we say with confidence about food in Spanish and Mexican California? About the ingredients, we know much. Like the Sumerians, the Spanish and Mexican administrators left plenty of records about what was grown and imported. When it comes to the aesthetics and the art of cooking in that era we are left to puzzle over scraps of information. There are hints in the journals of soldiers, sailors, and merchants, and more data may be hidden in letters sent home to Spain or Mexico and preserved there. Like the scholar of Mesopotamian customs who hopes that the next tablet he translates will be a letter describing a family wedding to someone who couldn’t make it, I live in hope that more will turn up (8).   

Richard Foss has been writing about food and drink for over thirty years and has authored histories of rum and of food in flight from the zeppelin era to the space station. He is on the Board of the Culinary Historians of Southern California, is the California Curator for the Museum of the American Cocktail, and is the curator for the soon to open Pacific Food & Beverage Museum. 

Notes

1. As American merchant Alfred Robinson observed in 1829, “No advantage is derived from them beyond their value as hides and tallow, and thus thousands of dollars yearly are left to perish on the field.” Online edition is at https://archive.org/details/lifeincalifornia03robi

2. See http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/Mexicoreader/Chapter4/Vancouver.pdf, pps. 67-94

3. Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait, P. 323” Pub 1832 https://archive.org/details/voyageofdiscover01kotz

4. A New Voyage Round The World In The Years 1823-26, P. 100-104 Pub1830 https://archive.org/details/narrativeofvoyag01beec

5. Original text in Spanish at https://content.scu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/pinedo/id/1403. The book “Encarnacion’s Kitchen, by Dan Strehl (UC Berkeley Press 2005), has translations of selected recipes along with biographical information and much else. It is the must-have reference for anyone interested in historic California cooking.  

6. Full text at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39586

7. No online edition found.

8. And yes, I am writing a book about cooking in Early California. If you know any contemporary sources I’d be delighted to hear from you.