Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
Last week, I announced that I was starting a series of posts featuring California Cuisine.
I am incredibly lucky to live in one of the most dynamic places on the planet. It is home to high-tech innovators like Apple, Meta and Google. It is also home to innovative restaurants like Chez Panisse, The Slanted Door, and The French Laundry, to name a few. Northern California is an area where access to fresh, bold and flavorful ingredients meets relentless innovation, and it only makes sense that it became one of the incubators for the California Cuisine movement.
California Cuisine started gaining a foothold in the 1970’s and was a sort of an off-shoot of the Nouvelle Cuisine movement in France. Nouvelle Cuisine emphasized lighter food, fresh ingredients, lighter sauces and inventive flavors and plating. It also embraced a lighter touch on cooking–overcooking meats and vegetables was avoided in order to let the ingredients speak for themselves, rather than have them doused in a heavy sauce or lots of butter and cream.
Nouvelle Cuisine had its critics–chief among them were the more traditional French chefs, as well as none other than Julia Child, who thought the techniques used in traditional French cooking were vital to developing the essential tastes of the ingredients. Others mocked Nouvelle Cuisine as a “Socratic” method of cooking because it tended to be collaborative–experimenting and coming up with the recipe that would best showcase the ingredients, rather than sticking to a traditional tried-and-true format.
Still, Nouvelle Cuisine made a huge splash on the international scene, including in the United States, using the modern media of the time–TV, radio and magazines–with the celebrities of Nouvelle Cuisine featured on magazine covers and morning talk shows. The trend toward lighter food, fresh ingredients, smaller portions and a transition from traditional techniques and flavors couldn’t be ignored. And it took hold most notably in California, where fresh ingredients were easier to find and even easier to cultivate in its rich soil and moderate climate.
And cultivate them we did.
California became an incubator for new ideas in food, ingredients and flavors. Avid home cooks were keen to spread their wings and get into the kitchen. They liked to eat out and try new food, particularly that of the immigrants to the Bay Area, who transformed the palate of the region. With the lure of California’s elite universities and proximity to Pacific Rim countries and Mexico, California attracted a diverse group of immigrants. These people brought with them their deep and vibrant cultural and culinary traditions; as they were able to find ingredients, they began to cook their native foods and eventually opened restaurants to share these flavors with a wider audience.
California, and particularly Northern California has always been a melting pot. It is also a hotbed of innovation. It was only a matter of time before Northern California with its rich cultural makeup and Silicon Valley innovators proved to be the “perfect storm,” where creativity, fresh ingredients and spunk came together to be leaders in the California Cuisine movement.
Southern California had its own influence on the movement, as well, and led the way for celebrity chefs, such as Wolfgang Puck, to become influential household names. Furthermore, Southern California influenced the reason we eat out–creating more of an “event” out of dining out, by renovating the restaurants themselves. Gone was the dark, heavy atmosphere of restaurants of a bygone era–and in its place was entertainment dining, which included wood-burning ovens for pizzas and grilled meats.
Nouvelle Cuisine dipped its toe in transitioning from traditional thinking about food, but the California Cuisine revolution pushed traditions away by admitting these avid home cooks, and, critically, women into the ranks of the professional kitchen. Prior to the California food movement, women were mostly only involved with cooking at high-end restaurants if they actually owned the restaurant. As women stepped into the role of cooking in professional kitchens, things started to change: there was more collaboration with regard to the food offerings. Gone was the strict hierarchy of traditional kitchens, where there was a “Chef de Cuisine,” a “Sous Chef,” and so on. In the new California kitchens, it was likely that everyone had a turn at every station and recipes were developed through participation, rather than mandated by a head chef–in other words, through the Socratic method.
Also gone were the static menus. Menus that featured the same items 365 days a year, never changing and always, always, always including the same vegetables regardless of the season, were gone. In their place were menus that changed regularly–some even changed daily, with chefs and restaurant owners laboriously writing out the new menu for each day based on what was available at the market that morning. Out was sourcing these static menu items from all over the world; in was serving menu items that were in-season and fresh that day. This took some getting used to because up until this time, going out to dinner was frequently only for special occasions–birthdays, anniversaries, etc–and folks would go to their favorite restaurant and order their favorite meal, that included asparagus 365 days a year. But remember–this was a time when women were entering the work force in larger numbers and convenience foods were gaining popularity. With extra income, and less time to cook, folks were eating out more and there was more interest in exploring new and different tastes and cuisines. Like I said–it was a perfect storm.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the innovations within these exciting, new California Cuisine-centric restaurants was the emergence of the first major food trend I will be addressing: wood-fired cooking. Alice Waters made a bold choice by introducing a huge wood-fired oven into her restaurant, and Wolfgang Puck followed suit. In them, talented chefs grilled meats, seafood and, notably, pizzas, which became a hallmark of California Cuisine..
And with this first introduction out of the way, I am so excited about starting this series honoring California Cuisine!
Join me later this week, when I’ll start the exploration of food on fire!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
