Cucina Fresca: Cal-Ital Before Cal-Ital Was Cool

It seems hard to believe today, but there once was a time--not so very long ago, in fact--when California was not generally considered to be a misplaced region of Italy. Back then, Chez Panisse was cooking French food and Spago was just beginning to send a frisson of excitement through the food world by serving--can you believe the daring?--pizza.

In 1985, Evan Kleiman and Viana La Place, two Los Angeles cooks and writers who focused on bringing a lighter California sensibility to Italian cooking, were out on the frontier of cuisine. They were Cal-Ital, when Cal-Ital wasn’t cool. With three books, “Cucina Fresca,” “Pasta Fresca” and “Cucina Rustica,” they anticipated the movement that became a landslide. Now those books are being reprinted by William Morrow in handsome paperback editions. If you don’t have them, you ought to.

La Place, who now lives in the Bay Area, and Kleiman, then as now chef at Angeli Caffe on Melrose (she also hosts the “Good Food” radio show Saturday mornings on KCRW-FM [89.9]), were in the right place at the right time with just the right sensibility, even if they might have been a bit ahead of their time.

“Cucina Fresca” was considered a bit of a shock when it was published in 1986--though foodies were already turned on to Marcella Hazan and Giuliano Bugialli, most Americans were still getting around to the idea that Italian didn’t mean red sauce.

In the book’s introduction, Kleiman and La Place describe their food as “the tastes of the Italian kitchen ... treated in the light, modern manner” and observe that “we think there’s a strong link between Italy’s Cucina Fresca and the new California cuisine.” (That they felt the need to translate the title in the same introduction tells you how far things have come.)

All the hallmarks of today’s cooking are there in that first book: fresh, seasonal food, simply prepared. A fall barbecue menu in “Cucina Fresca” features roasted red onions in balsamic vinaigrette and grilled flank steak (how Cal-Ital is that?). An antipasti picnic menu in 1990’s “Cucina Rustica” sounds like something that guy was eating in the box next to you at the Hollywood Bowl last night: marinated vegetables, chicken salad, mixed green and yellow beans and a pound cake with fruit for dessert.

In all of the books, the recipes speak of food prepared with intelligence but without artifice. Most of them take little more than a half-dozen ingredients (including salt and pepper), and it’s hard to imagine many of them taking much more than a half-hour or so to prepare.

In their time, these books were a bit of an anachronism. That was the Silver Palate era, remember, and it was far more likely that the ambitious home cook would be found laboring through some sweet contrivance than focusing on simplicity and purity.

But to look at these books today is to understand how thoroughly this style of cooking has been absorbed into the mainstream.

Come to think of it, just when was the last time you used your raspberry vinegar?