Category Archives: Main Courses

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, … Continue reading →

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 20th century. Hirtzler included more … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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.  … Continue reading →

A restaurant named Coppa’s in San Francisco in the early part of the 20th century invented “the most delicious way chicken was ever cooked,” according to Clarence Edwords in his 1914 book, Bohemian San Francisco: Its Restaurants and Their Most … Continue reading →

Most of the 13 cookbooks represented in Vintage California Cuisine  are rudimentary, to put it politely. El Cocinero Español (The Spanish Cook), California’s first Spanish language cookbook, published in San Francisco in 1898 by Encarnación Pinedo, is a notable exception. … Continue reading →