Minestrone Soup and An Introduction to California Cuisine

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!

This week, I’m going to start a new series of posts that will focus on California Cuisine. California Cuisine is a big, bodacious revolution in the history of food that I’m super-excited to share with you, so this could take a while; I don’t know if I will be focused on California Cuisine for the next few weeks, months, years… or for the rest of the useful life of this blog. We’ll just have to see!

California cuisine, in a few words, is all about the ingredients: their flavors, their freshness, their quality, and the philosophy that if you have the best ingredients, you don’t have to do a lot with them to make them taste amazing. And I’ll be sharing much more about that in the weeks to come.

Let me give you a little background to my own journey:

Many, many years ago, a work acquaintance of mine handed me a favorite cookbook of his. He was retiring and clearing out stuff ahead of a move out of state. Once he left, I never heard from him again, but the book remained. It was well-worn: dog-eared and food splattered, so it was obvious that he’d sampled a good many of the recipes in it.

He liked to cook and considered himself to be a good one. His food was serviceable. It was not particularly imaginative, but it got the job done: roast beef, roasted vegetables, green salads, chicken or fish with a cream sauce of some kind, beef stroganoff–you get the picture. I was never moved by it either one way or another–it was…serviceable.

When I got home after he gave me the book, I eagerly dove into it. As I read through the recipes, I was struck with how few of the them called for fresh ingredients. The ingredient list universally included at least one can of Campbell’s soup or a can of pineapple tidbits, or both, and most also called for canned meats and canned vegetables or fruits. I checked the date of publication of the book and found that it was from the early 1970’s. This made sense: the era of convenience foods! Think jell-o salads, Hamburger Helper, canned tuna casseroles, and if you were feeling especially fancy, canned Mandarin oranges or asparagus! As a masterclass in retro-cooking, this cookbook was a masterpiece. As a guide to good cooking…well…questionable. Still–it was a time when women were trying to break out of domestic roles and into the workplace and the convenience of canned and frozen foods was revolutionary in its own right. So–not casting any shade.

I probably tried a recipe or two out of the book, but ultimately found that it didn’t really hit the mark for the type of cooking (or food) that I enjoyed, and at some point, it went to a Little Free Library. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy popping open a can of Campbell’s soup to make my famous meatloaf, or open up cans of pineapple to make my Granny’s sweet potato casserole at Thanksgiving–in fact, I open a lot of cans for Thanksgiving dinner–that’s just what Thanksgiving tastes like to me. It’s more that I have discovered that fresh food just tastes better than processed food.

I remember one of the first times I really tasted fresh food. Mr. Stone Soup and I were in the south of France, staying on an island in the middle of the Rhone River in Avignon. It was quite remote, but we had a spacious little cabin that included a cozy porch and a tiny kitchenette. It was stocked with a tea kettle, a skillet, a sauce pan, a couple of knives made out of stone, some plates, bowls and silverware. As we tooled around the island in our tiny rental car, we saw farmers sitting on the flipped-down tailgates of their trucks, displaying tidy piles of brightly colored, ripe, fresh fruits and vegetables. I could smell them from the car and I begged Mr. Soup to stop so I could buy some of it, insisting that I could make us dinner at our cabin. He was skeptical, but loves me too much to say “no” to such a request. I bought an eggplant, some tomatoes, a couple of zucchini, a yellow squash, an onion, some garlic and some sweet basil, reasoning that I could throw together a quick ratatouille. We stopped at a little grocery store and got some olive oil, pasta and a couple of chicken breasts. And wine. Duh. I also got some bread and cheese, and we were off to the races.

That night, we dined on grilled chicken, ratatouille, some pasta with olive oil, salt and pepper, and some fresh fruit and cheese for dessert. It was delicious and I WAS IN HEAVEN.

The next day, we went out to dinner and Mr. Soup was certain that we would have to discard the leftover fruits and vegetables I had. Overnight that night, Mr. Soup came down with the flu–he was running a pretty good fever, had chills, and general flu-like symptoms. Our innkeeper called in a doctor who confirmed that a 24-hour bug was making the rounds and to rest and get plenty of fluids. We had breakfast supplied by the inn, but other than that, Mr. Soup stayed in bed all day. By evening, we were both hungry and I decided to make soup out of the leftover ingredients, which included the vegetables, olive oil, sweet basil and, critically, some of the pasta. I made us minestrone soup that was absolutely sublime. The produce was all so fresh, flavorful, bright and clean–we could truly taste the ingredients as they were meant to be enjoyed. I’ve tried, but never quite been able to duplicate that minestrone. I decided long ago that it was the ingredients.

Ingredients are everything. The fresher the ingredients, the better the flavor. When a farmer grows a tomato, picks it in the morning and sells it to you at a farmer’s market later that day, that tomato is going to taste like a tomato is supposed to taste. Same for any fresh ingredients. Great strides have been made in freezing produce and much of the frozen produce available retains a lot of its nutritional value. But there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING like the vibrant taste of fresh produce that has been picked at its peak and served immediately thereafter, with minimal fuss in preparation.

California Cuisine embraces this approach to ingredients: fresh, local when possible (or when it makes sense), vibrant ingredients, prepared simply in such a way that the ingredients are allowed to shine. But, and I can’t emphasize this enough: “holier-than-thou” is not my style. For example, I love pecan oil and I will still source it from my favorite place in Georgia where they press the freshest, tastiest pecan oil in the country. And I also get it that the kind of produce I can get here in northern California isn’t available everywhere. Hence, I don’t promise that everything I do will be locally sourced or fresh every time, and I also get that sometimes we have to use canned or frozen ingredients. But local and fresh is a good goal because it tastes better, it’s better for the environment and it’s always a good thing to support your local economy, which includes those incredibly hard-working farmers.

The history of the California Cuisine movement is fascinating. I have just finished reading the extremely interesting book “Inside the California Food Revolution: Thirty Years That Changed Our Culinary Consciousness” by Joyce Goldstein. In it, Goldstein gives an in-depth description of the motivations and movements that led this ground-breaking style of cooking: the emphasis on fresh, bold flavors, cooking techniques, styles, cultural influences and bold, innovative experiments in the approach to cooking, dining and restaurant experiences. Over the next few weeks, as I share California cuisine recipes, I will also share more about the fascinating history of this food revolution.

This is a BIG topic, and t was kind of hard to decide where to start. I read and studied and then I wrote and wrote without really finding a starting place. But–California cuisine is all about the ingredients and big bold flavors and given that the first time I feel I really “tasted” food was when I made minestrone soup with the freshest ingredients I’ve ever had, I figured that was a good place to start.

Here is my recipe for Stone Soup Minestrone: