California Cuisine 1920

In the ‘20s and ‘30s--as for most of the last hundred years--Los Angeles was full of people who hadn’t been born here. Most of L.A.’s newcomers were from the Midwest, and the current idea of food was largely Midwestern.

For instance, if you were rich or famous (or the celebrities considered you interesting enough), you might be invited to join the Breakfast Club, which gathered Wednesday mornings to have breakfast outdoors on Riverside Drive. Meetings had some of the sociable paraphernalia of a Midwestern businessmen’s fraternity: a symbolic Buried Hatchet, a Golden Ruler and so on. There might be 300 breakfasters singing songs like “Ham and Eggs” (tune: “Tammany”):

Ham and Eggs, Ham and Eggs

I like mine fried good and brown

I like mine fried upside down

Ham and Eggs, Ham and Eggs

Flip ‘em! Flop ‘em! Flop ‘em! Flip ‘em!

Ham and Eggs!

Perhaps the Breakfast Club showed an emerging casual California lifestyle, but the ham and eggs do not have the unique regional associations of, say, fried scrapple or red beans and rice. The fast-growing city couldn’t be said to have a culinary style of its own.

Any tendency toward distinctiveness would also have had to fight the cultural leveling--call it the spread of a new vernacular culture if you prefer--that was going on all over America at the time. It was partly due to what people called “the servant problem.” At the turn of the century, comfortable middle-class households always had servants, and live-in maids were commonplace even way out west in Los Angeles. By the mid-’20s, though, domestic workers rarely lived with their employers. They were no longer maids of all work but “cleaning ladies,” and from now on middle-class women would have to do their own cooking.

Because of the need to make things easy for the servantless housewife--and the new phenomenon of the career woman--a cuisine arose, as if by magic, based on convenience foods, above all canned goods. This was the era when tables not only throughout Los Angeles but throughout America served identical seven-can casseroles, accompanied by Jell-O salads made with canned fruits and marshmallows, followed by Grape Nuts pudding.

Fortunately, the gas range became common right at this time. As Sunset Magazine observed in 1920, no longer did families dread the words “We had a bad bake day,” meaning that the cook hadn’t been able to get the temperature right in one of the old-fashioned charcoal-burning ovens. The ‘20s went wild for souffles, which had been unthinkable for a home cook before the gas oven.

Local food traditions were also under attack from new health ideas, which had been spread during World War I. Using the slogans “Food Will Win the War” and “Lick Your Plate and Lick the Kaiser,” the wartime Food Administration (under a bright young administrator named Herbert Hoover, who everybody said was going places) had encouraged people to eat less in order to support our boys at the front, and to eat more healthily. Above all, it popularized the recent medical discoveries called vitamins.

America has never recovered. Before World War I, the aim of dieting had always been to put on weight; by 1920, most diets were for losing weight, as they still are. It was in the age of the gazelle-slim flapper that cooks began to look at food primarily as vitamins, minerals and protein.

Southern California went wilder for vitamins than any other part of the country. The Midwestern retirees and the Hollywood people, together with the now-forgotten element that had moved here because of Southern California’s healthful air, became obsessed with vitamins, even though the specific diseases they were known to prevent--such as scurvy, pellagra and beriberi--were not exactly serious problems around here. Hollywood became the national capital of raw foods, multigrain breads and low-calorie salad dressings.

During the ‘20s, a food faddist named Elmer McCollum persuaded many Californians that if they didn’t eat enough “alkaline-forming” foods, they could get something called “acidosis.” As cookery writers dutifully explained, alkaline-forming foods included nearly all fruits, including (although this was a little hard to explain) the quite acid citrus fruits. In fact, oranges and lemons were basically miracle foods.

A convenient harmony was at work here, because citrus fruits were a local product. Southern Californians made a distinct effort to use such ingredients--as much, one suspects, from motives of thrift (they were cheaper here than anywhere else) and local patriotism as for health reasons. Fig and Raisin Cake and Avocado Souffle were characteristic; we also had wholesome local seafood such as abalone, which was scarcely eaten anywhere else.

Since the 1880s, Californians had been known as great salad eaters. To be sure, in those days they had not been making the lettuce salads with vinaigrette dressing that we’re famous for now, but the same salads the rest of the country was making: that is, fruit salads, gelatin salads and salads of cooked meat or vegetables mixed with mayonnaise or boiled dressing. Southern Californians tended to use wilder ingredients, though, including bizarre orange-juice sauces.

Then, in the ‘20s, the Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana, but popularized by the Hollywood crowd. Made with romaine lettuce, it had a vinaigrette dressing thickened with coddled egg, more or less a halfway stage between mayonnaise and vinaigrette. It was originally served not in a salad bowl but as finger food for a party--more California casualness. The Cobb salad, invented at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood in the ‘30s, took a further step: Although it was actually a sort of chef’s salad with meat, cheese and avocado, its sauce was a true, if garlicky, vinaigrette dosed with Worcestershire sauce.

Then in 1936, the Saturday Evening Post published an article on how greens tossed with a simple dressing of vinegar and oil was the supreme of all salads. (This same article also insisted that the salad had to be mixed in an unvarnished wooden bowl and seasoned with fresh pepper from a pepper mill, motifs that lingered for decades.) Californians were entranced: an authentic gourmet dish full of vitamins! Green salad became the standard Southern California appetizer--to the amusement of Europeans, who considered salad something to follow the main course.

In the early ‘30s, a British writer observed that the Hollywood crowd’s great ambition seemed to be building a fire out of sticks and cooking a steak outdoors. Around the same time, Sunset published a design for a small temporary barbecue hearth made of unmortared bricks; for a grill, the cook just borrowed a rack from the oven. Salad and barbecue were to become a staple of Southern California entertaining, and it has been argued that the California Cuisine of the ‘80s was basically the traditional salad and barbecue meal with more exotic ingredients.

True, the ‘20s were not a gastronomic age. Prohibition had a disastrous effect on dining habits throughout the country, destroying the feeble toehold French food had gained in America beginning in the 1890s. French chefs had left this country in droves, and their disgust can be understood if you read some of the pathetic French recipes current in ‘20s cookbooks, such as sole Marguery with grape juice in place of wine. Even when Repeal came in 1933, it wasn’t enough to revive French cooking. That had to wait for the ‘50s.

Nor was the Depression a time of great food, for obvious reasons. For decades afterward, many people who by then could afford better instinctively bought day-old bread and margarine instead of butter. When a bottle of ketchup was empty, they’d put a tablespoon or two of water into it and rinse out the last taste before springing for a new bottle.

But more sophisticated elements existed in Los Angeles even in those dark times. The Hollywood people, who were as unsophisticated as anybody else in town to begin with, did a lot of traveling and had new gastronomic experiences such as fettuccine al burro (discovered in Rome by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who renamed it fettuccine Alfredo). A lot of travelers encountered guacamole around the same time (although they weren’t sure how to spell it; the ‘20s film star Helen Twelvetrees called her recipe wakimoli ).

In 1939 the Southern California gourmets began to have a public voice when M. F. K. Fisher, under the pen name Savarin St. Sure, inaugurated a tiny food magazine named Bohemian Life. Eventually, the sophisticates would have their effect.

At the time, Southern California cooking didn’t look like much: a Midwestern heritage being smothered by health faddism and convenience foods, leavened perhaps with a little familiarity with Chinese and Mexican cuisine and certainly with a lot of casual lifestyle. Look a little more carefully, though, and the outlines of the future come into view.

CORN WAFFLES

2 cups cake flour

3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

2 eggs, well beaten

1 cup corn kernels

1/4 cup melted butter

Combine cake flour, baking powder and salt in bowl. Stir in milk and eggs. Add corn and butter. Bake 3/4 to 1 cup batter at time in hot waffle iron. Makes about 4 large waffles.

Note: Thawed frozen corn may be used.

From Sunset Magazine, March , 1929.

AVOCADO SOUFFLE

1 medium avocado, peeled and seeded

3 egg whites

1/4 cup sugar

Minced black olives

1 hard-cooked egg, grated

Lemon juice

Press avocado through sieve or puree in food processor. Beat egg whites until almost stiff, then gradually beat in sugar. Continue beating until stiff and glossy. Fold into avocado pulp.

Turn into buttered 2-cup souffle dish. Set dish in larger pan of boiling water and bake at 375 degrees 15 to 20 minutes or until souffle is lightly browned and set in center.

Garnish with olives and egg and sprinkle with lemon juice to taste. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

From Mrs. John Tansey of Hollywood, printed in Sunset Magazine, May , 1929.

CAESAR SALAD

3 medium heads romaine lettuce, chilled

1 clove garlic, mashed

2 eggs

1/3 cup olive oil

1 tablespoon wine vinegar

Juice of 1 1/2 lemons

Salt

Coarsely ground black pepper

Worcestershire sauce

Croutons

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Remove large outer leaves of romaine and reserve for another use. Break remaining lettuce into bite-size pieces and spin-dry. Rub bottom of salad bowl with mashed garlic.

Boil eggs exactly 2 minutes. Break eggs into salad bowl. Add olive oil, vinegar and lemon juice. Add salt, pepper and Worcestershire to taste. Beat with whisk until creamy.

Add lettuce and Croutons and toss. Add cheese and toss again. Makes 4 servings.

Croutons

1 cup 1/2-inch cubes white bread

2 cloves garlic

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons olive oil

Place bread cubes on baking sheet and bake at 300 degrees until dried. Mash garlic with salt and olive oil and strain into skillet. Heat, then add dried bread and toss 1 minute.

ABALONE STEAKS WITH EGGPLANT AND MUSHROOMS

4 large frozen, pounded abalone steaks, thawed

Salt, pepper

Flour

Olive oil or butter

1 cup mushrooms, sliced

1 cup diced eggplant

Juice of 1 lemon

1 tablespoon capers

1 tablespoon minced parsley

1 lemon, sliced

Paprika

Sprinkle steaks with salt and pepper to taste. Dredge in flour. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil or butter in skillet over medium-high heat. Saute abalone steaks briefly. Remove and keep warm.

Dredge mushrooms and eggplant in flour, then saute until golden in 3 tablespoons olive oil or butter.

Arrange abalone on platter, cover with mushrooms and eggplant and pour butter remaining in pan over all. Sprinkle with lemon juice, capers and parsley. Garnish with lemon slices dipped in paprika. Makes 4 servings.

From Blanch L. Frank, in “The Palatists Book of Cookery,” the Palatists, a branch of the Assistance League of Southern California , 1933.

FIG CAKE WITH MOCHA FROSTING

1 cup boiling water

1/2 pound dried figs, chopped

1 cup raisins

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup flour

Mocha Frosting

Pour boiling water over figs and raisins in bowl. Add baking soda, stir and let cool.

Cream together butter, sugar and eggs. Add cloves, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon juice and vanilla. Combine with fig-raisin mixture, add flour and mix to blend.

Place batter in 9-inch-square baking pan lined with parchment paper. Bake at 350 degrees 45 minutes. When cool, spread top with Mocha Frosting. Makes 6 to 9 servings.

Mocha Frosting

1/3 cup butter, softened

1 cup powdered sugar, sifted

2 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla

5 teaspoons instant coffee powder, about

Cream butter until light. Beat in sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla and enough coffee to make spreadable consistency.