I’ve made several variations of this recipe from Encarnacion Pinedo’s 1898 cookbook, El Cocinero Espanol. This time, I wanted a thicker incarnation of the dish than I ended up with in my previous attempts.

In the original Spanish, the recipe, titled “Salsa de Almendras para Gallinas,” is just 24 words long (42 in  translation). It is a bare-bones list of ingredients with no guidance at all about quantities and proportions. Here’s the translation of the original recipe that I reprinted in Vintage California Cuisine in a chapter about Pinedo and her book:

Almond Sauce for Hens

Put the stock used for cooking the hen in a saucepan. Add sliced tomatoes, garlic, slices of peeled and cored pineapple, chorizo sausage, a tablespoon of vinegar, raisins, almonds, small pickled chile peppers [chilitos], salt, pepper and the de-boned pieces of hen.

Source: El Cocinero Español (1898)

The first time I made the recipe, I started with several cups of chicken broth, the yield from poaching a small fryer. The recipe seems to suggest doing that, and hence, using a fair amount of stock. But the end result was a soup, not a “sauce,” and the almonds were lost in all that broth. I must say, it was a very delicious chicken-tomato-pineapple soup. But it wasn’t anything like an “almond sauce,” which is what I was determined to end up with this time. My benchmark this time was my favorite Iranian dish, a similar, fruity nut sauce for chicken called fesenjan, made with ground walnuts instead of almonds and pomegranate syrup instead of pineapple and tomato.

I looked up some fesenjan recipes to get an idea of an appropriate ratio of (solid) nut meal to (liquid) fruit and stock. Most fesenjan recipes have about a 1:1 ratio of walnut to liquid (a mixture of chicken stock and pomegranate syrup). Since the fruit components of Pineda’s almond sauce, particularly the pineapple, are considerably more solid than the liquid components of fesenjan, I guessed that a 2:5 ratio of nut meal to pineapple-tomato-stock might be about right for this dish.

The following recipe is what I came up with. Since the chicken in real Iranian fesenjan is always chicken breast, I used boneless breast this time, instead of the deboned meat of a whole fryer that I used last time I experimented with Pinedo’s recipe. I had extra chicken stock and ground almond on hand to adjust the thickness as the stew cooked, if necessary. In fact, the proportions I used on my first attempt, as shown below, worked out just right. What I came up with I will call…

Old California Almond-Pineapple ‘Fesenjan’

1 pound boneless skinless chicken breast
2 cups diced pineapple
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2 cups toasted ground almond
1 cup chicken stock
½ cup chopped raisins
6 oz. chorizo sausage, crumbled
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbs vinegar
Several pickled hot chili peppers (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Puree in a blender or food processor one cup each of the pineapple and tomato, with a little water or chicken stock to thin if needed.

2. Lightly toast the ground almonds in the bottom of a heavy sauce pan for several minutes, stirring and shaking constantly to prevent burning. Add chicken stock, pureed pineapple and tomato, crumbled chorizo, garlic, vinegar, chilis (optional) and chopped raisins. Stir and bring to a simmer over low heat.

2.  Stir in the remaining one cup each of diced pineapple and tomatoes, and the chicken breast, cut into pieces.

3. Continue cooking on low heat for 15 or 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, adding salt and pepper to taste.  If the stew gets too thick while cooking, stir in small amounts of chicken stock, as needed.

Victor Hirtzler amassed quite a collection of recipes in his globe-trotting career as a chef, which culminated in a two-decade reign at the Hotel St. Francis in San  Francisco in the early part of the 20^th century. Hirtzler included more than 3,000 recipes in the 1919 edition of the Hotel St. Francis Cook Book.

Which was his best dish? Clarence Edwords, a food writer and San Francisco publicist, asked him that question on a visit to the Hotel St. Francis while gathering recipes for a book he published in 1914, Bohemian San Francisco: Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes. Hirtzler’s answer: “I shall give you Sole Edward VII.”

A number of the French-born chef’s recipes were named after European royalty. They were mementos of his stints as personal cook for King Don Carlos of Portugal and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, and as a member of the staff at restaurants frequented by aristocrats. In all likelihood, Hirtzler personally prepared his favorite sole dish for its namesake, though that probably would have happened before Edward VII became king of England.

King Edward VII

The eldest son of Queen Victoria, Albert Edward was consigned to the role of crown prince for decades before his mother died when he was 60, clearing the way for his ascent to the throne in 1901. By then, Hirtzler was ensconced at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. But during the previous decade, Hirtzler was a chef at the Grand Hotel in Paris, one of the swankiest hotels in the world in its day. During his seemingly interminable turn as heir apparent, Edward gained a reputation as a playboy and all-around bon vivant, who represented Great Britain on ceremonial occasions and on trips abroad. On any trip to Paris, he likely would have stayed and dined at the Grand Hotel, and he may have ordered–and must have praised and reordered–the sole dish that Hirtzler offered Clarence Edwords in San Francisco a couple of decades later.

Here’s the recipe, as recounted in Edwords’ book:
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Sole Edward VII

Cut the fillets out of one sole and lay them flat on a buttered pan, and season with salt and pepper. Make the following mixture and spread over each fillet of sole: Take one-half pound of sweet butter, three ounces of chopped salted almonds, one-fourth pound of chopped fresh mushrooms, a little chopped parsley, the juice of a lemon, salt, pepper and a little grated nutmeg. Add to the pan one-half glassful of white wine and put in the oven for twenty minutes. When done serve in the pan by placing it on a platter, with a napkin under it.

Source: Bohemian San Francisco:
Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes

mushroom-almond mixture

As is the case with most of the other old recipes that I have reprinted in Vintage California Cuisine, this one leaves room for interpretation. To begin with, the amount of fish is imprecise, to put it mildly. Judging from the fact that the recipe calls for half a pound – two full sticks – of butter, one can surmise that Hirtzler started with a mighty big fish, or else he meant for the finished fillets to be swimming in butter. The recipe implies that the mushroom component of the almond-mushroom topping should be mixed in with the other ingredients in a raw state. The second of the two times that I experimented with this recipe, I sliced the mushrooms instead of chopping them, and I sautéed them in butter before stirring them in with the other topping ingredients.

The result: anyone with aristocratic pretensions in this day and age would surely expect something quite a bit more spectacular that this from a high end restaurant’s kitchen. But it’s a perfectly serviceable, simple fish dish for the rest of us.

Visitors to San Francisco in the early 1900s might have asked locals to name the mayor or governor, or how to get to Chinatown. “But they never ask who is the chef at Hotel St. Francis. They know,” to hear the introduction to the hotel’s cookbook tell it. Victor Hirtzler was a household name, one of the most famous men in town, and one of the best chef’s on earth. There are “many eminent exponents of culinary art” in San Francisco, “but Chef Victor is the ruler of them all,” the book proclaimed.

Born in Strasbourg, France, around 1875, Hirtzler earned his stripes as a chef at some of Europe’s preeminent restaurants, and cooked for kings and czars before coming to the United States. After a stint at two of the best restaurants in New York, he moved to San Francisco in 1904 to become master chef at the lavish, new Hotel St. Francis on Union Square. Undeterred by the earthquake and firestorm that devastated the city and gutted the hotel just two years later, Hirtzler remained in San Francisco for 22 years.

A dashing figure with his trademark red fez, jaunty goatee and waxed moustache, Hirtzler drew a steady stream of the rich and famous to the Hotel St. Francis dining room, and turned heads wherever he went. His best recipes were published in 1910 in L’Arte Culinaire: Hotel St. Francis Book of Recipes and Model Menus, 26 of which I have included in Vintage California Cuisine. I previously wrote about his prune soufflé, which the book said “everyone likes.”  The cookbook offers no comment on the unusual dish I decided to test today: strawberry omelette.

I was especially interested in it because I recently wrote about unconventional uses of strawberries for my Seasonal Chef web site. For years, I have regularly made delicious strawberry mustard, and I was curious about other savory uses of the fruit. According to the California Strawberry Commission, many trendy chefs these days “are using strawberries in innovative ways that extend beyond dessert” – as a pizza ingredient, for instance, or in salsas, chutneys and gazpachos. Hirtzler, it seems, was a century ahead of the curve with this recipe.

Strawberry Omelette

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Hull a basket of berries and put them in a double boiler with a half cup of granulated sugar. Do not add any water, as the juice of the berries and the steam will form plenty of liquid. Do not stir, as the berries should be entire. To make the omelette, beat the eggs light as usual, adding a little salt but no pepper. When about done, heap the berries on the eggs, and roll up and pile nicely on the platter. Pour the juice about the omelette.

Source: L’Arte Culinaire: Hotel St. Francis
Book of Recipes and Model Menus (1910)

I had never tried cooking strawberries in a double boiler. After about an hour of cooking, the result was, as promised in the recipe. The berries were softened to the consistency of jam yet were fully intact. And though I used no water at all, they had exuded an abundance of beautiful, pure strawberry syrup.

I split the omelette between myself and my intrepid taste tester and housemate, Sherry. We were prepared for the possibility that this would be a waste of good strawberries and eggs. But what do you know! “It’s better than I was expecting,” said Sherry after a few bites. After a few more bites, she said, with a hint of amazement, “It’s good!” We both happily finished our servings. It would be better, in my opinion, if the savory component was kicked up a notch with, for instance, some onions, and if just a pinch of sugar were used. But Hirtzler had the basic idea right: strawberries are more versatile than you might think, if you’ve only had them in pies, jams and the like.

For a vintage California dinner party at my home in Philadelphia the other night, I made a recipe from the 1903 Landmarks Club Cook Book called Peruvian Albondigas. The word means meatballs – in this case, meatballs of lamb, olives and hardboiled eggs stuffed into peppers. 

What is Californian about a Peruvian recipe? California cuisine is based on a mélange of ingredients and cooking styles brought to the state by immigrants from around the world. During the first decades after statehood, before the transcontinental railroad was completed, the ports strung out along the Pacific rim of the Americas, were a lot more accessible to California than most of the rest of the United States, served as they were by regularly scheduled coastal steamship lines. Contingents of fortune seekers from Chile and Peru were among the first to reach California in the Gold Rush, and they brought their foodways with them. Which is why it is fitting that a Peruvian recipe has a place in Vintage California Cuisine.

This particular recipe, to be sure, was most likely not brought to the state by a gold seeker during the Gold Rush. It is from the Landmarks Club Cook Book, published in Los Angeles in 1903 as a fund raiser for an organization that had recently been revived by Charles Fletcher Lummis to restore California’s neglected Spanish-era missions. Lummis himself probably collected it during 10 miserable months that he spent in Peru in 1892-93. A flamboyant journalist, Indian rights activist and aficionado of Southwestern cuisine (among many other things), Lummis accompanied his dour friend, the famous archeologist Adolph Bandelier, on an archeological expedition to Peru that winter. They had agreed that Lummis, a past master at getting attention, would publicize the discoveries from the ancient ruins that Bandelier intended to excavate, by writing articles for the leading magazines of the day.

Charles Lummis, photo courtesy of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, N.21821.

In reality, as I reported in the biography I wrote about Lummis, Bandelier, who was beset with a succession of agonizing ailments, and worst of all, endured the drawn out death of his wife in Lima, became paranoid that Lummis would steal all the credit for his findings. So Bandelier basically abandoned Lummis in gloomy Lima and headed out to the ruins on his own. Lummis’s loneliness dripped from the letters he wrote to his wife, averaging 1,500 words a day for every one of the 279 days that he was in Peru. In my research for the biography, I had time to barely dip into that particular 416,000-word batch of correspondence. But knowing of Lummis’s fascination with food, and his tendency to obsessively record such details as what he ate every day, I suspect that this particular recipe was included in one of those letters.

lamb, olives and hard-boiled egg stuffing

All of which is to say, there was enough of historical interest for me in these  stuffed peppers that I was going to enjoy them, whether they were tasty or not. They were bound to be interesting, I figured, owing to the intriguing use of raisins in both the stuffing mixed with olives and in the tomato sauce.

Raisins, as it happens, turn up in a number of the recipes I’ve reprinted in Vintage California Cuisine – in the enchilada, stuffed pepper and stuffed onion recipes in a cookbook published in Santa Barbara in 1888, for instance, and in a green bean recipe published in 1910 by San Francisco’s leading celebrity chef of that era, Victor Hirtzler. Have raisins have fallen out of favor in contemporary Southwestern cuisine?  I couldn’t find a single reference to them in my copy of the authoritative, 500-page Border Cookbook: Authentic Home Cooking of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. That’s our loss, judging from this recipe, which, to finally get to the point of this post, was outstanding, according to all of my dinner guests.

So, here’s the recipe, followed by a few comments on how I interpreted, and experimented, with it.

Peruvian Albondigas

Boil mutton till tender. Scald large green chile peppers and remove their thin outer skin. Hash the meat and make it into a stuffing with raisins, stoned ripe olives and hard-boiled eggs minced fine. Fill the peppers with this stuffing and put them in a pot in which has already been prepared a sauce of tomatoes, whole red chile peppers, raisins, onion and a little broth, and heat slowly, twenty minutes, without stirring. Garlic can be added.
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Source: The Landmarks Club Cook Book:
 a California Collection of the Choicest
Recipes  from Everywhere (1903)

First of all, I probably could have found real mutton at an ethnic market somewhere in town. But I used lamb instead. And I could have braised some lamb shanks or stew meat and shredded that to more closely approximate the original recipe. But since I was cooking for a dinner party, and wanted to streamline things, I saved lots of time and labor by starting with ground lamb, which cooked up in a few minutes, and was already “hashed.”

So that the raisins would more readily incorporate with the other ingredients, I chopped them up and used a heaping cup full of packed raisins bits, evenly divided between the stuffing for 14 peppers and enough tomato sauce for two casserole dishes. Even more raisins wouldn’t have hurt. I used a scant cup of chopped kalamata olives and eight chopped up hard boiled eggs for the stuffing.

Peruvian Albondigas Casserole

As for the stuffing, I stuffed half the peppers with a lamb mixture, in line with the recipe. For the vegetarian guests I expected, I stuffed the remaining peppers with a stuffing mix in which I replaced the lamb with ricotta cheese.

For the tomato sauce, I chopped up some fresh Roma tomatoes that I had on hand, and sauted them with the onions, and I added to that a large, 32-ounce can of crushed tomatoes, cooking it all for awhile with the raisins until it thickened up a bit. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have cooked the sauce down quite as much, since the dishes I ended up with were a bit on the dry side. Although the recipe calls for cooking the stuffed peppers in a pot, presumably on the stove top, I ladled the sauce into two casserole dishes, nestled the stuffed peppers down into the sauce, and baked them for an hour in a 350 degree oven, covered with tin foil for all but the last 15 minutes.

The ricotta cheese version

Here in chile pepper-challenged Philadelphia in the dead of winter, I rounded up a grand total of four usable Anaheim peppers. The other peppers I used were yellow wax peppers and Italian frying peppers, all of which were sweet. I followed the instruction to scald and peel the peppers. But the peeling didn’t slip off, so I gave up on that. Scalding them for perhaps six or eight minutes was essential anyway, to make the peppers pliable enough to easily and quickly stem, devein, slit lengthwise and stuff. The unnamed dried, round red chiles that I found in a local market and used were also, as it turned out, sweet. So the stuffed peppers I served up had nary a hint of chile pepper heat. None of my guests complained about that. But next time, I might stuff a few poblanos, and make one casserole dish with a sauce spiked with hot red chilis, for those who want stuffed peppers with more of a kick.

That said, the stuffed peppers I ended up with this time – both the ricotta and the lamb versions — were, by all accounts, outstanding. The combination of sweet raisins and acidic tomatoes and onions in the sauce was downright awesome. The combination of sweet raisins and briny olives in the stuffing: equally awesome. Thanks to my man Charles Lummis for finding this dish as he was miserably cooling his heels in Lima, Peru, 120 years ago this winter.