Why everyone from Herb Caen to Clint Eastwood contributed to this SF cookbook

Recipe contributors include former and current SF residents ranging from socialites to luminaries, from longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (spaghetti sauce) to former San Francisco mayor and current U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (baked chicken) to actor and SF native Clint Eastwood (salad dressing). 

In the world of cookbooks, others have glossier production values. But when it comes to cookbooks that transport us into the home kitchens of San Francisco’s historic who’s who, the 1987 tome is among select company.

An unexpected opportunity

The community cookbook was printed as a fundraiser to support the San Francisco Ballet. It was the collective effort of the San Francisco Ballet Association Auxiliary — a small, dedicated volunteer group — who tasked itself with organizing donation drives and increasing recognition of the ballet.

But a cookbook as a fundraising project was somewhat of an accident. 

On a visit to Seattle, Linda Plant, chair of the auxiliary in 1987, was told a Seattle publisher’s book project had fallen through and was asked if the auxiliary would be interested in taking its spot. The concept was for a local community cookbook with untested recipes. It would need to go to press in six weeks.

The auxiliary jumped at the chance and calculated that it needed to solicit and receive recipes within two weeks. “If we didn’t make it, we couldn’t do it,” Plant said. 

Letters to local celebrities needed to be written and mailed, with no guarantee of a response. Recipe requests were made without an offer of financial remuneration — only the San Francisco Ballet’s goodwill and the satisfaction of helping a local cultural institution.

“We were off and running,” Plant recalled. “It was all in my dining room. A group of girls from the auxiliary to stamp and lick the letters, and with a big return envelope.”

Out went the letters — about 600 of them — and the waiting game began.

The first reply came from food writer M. F. K. Fisher. The doyenne of American food writing was an eminent author and translator who lived in Glen Ellen near Sonoma. Besides her many essays and books — including “Serve It Forth” and “The Gastronomical Me” — she also produced an authoritative translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s “The Physiology of Taste.” (A variation of its English translation is where we get the aphorism “you are what you eat.”)

“It was like, oh my God,” Plant said. “Couldn’t have been anybody better. It just couldn’t have been. It was like an omen. And they just poured in.” 

The auxiliary received 205 mailed responses in total. It collected the recipes in an envelope, sent them to the publisher and awaited the book’s printing.

From Virginia Adams to Stephen Zellerbach

The book was organized alphabetically by surname. The first entry belongs to Virginia Adams, whose skillet chicken with tomatillos and Chimayó chile drew inspiration from trips to the American Southwest with husband Ansel Adams. The final recipe is that of businessman, vintner and former president of the San Francisco Ballet Association Stephen Zellerbach for orange-glazed pork roast. (Zellerbach’s famous San Francisco family made some of its early fortunes as the first mass producer of folded paper towels in public restroom dispensers.)

The book can be considered an interesting curio, a nice dinner conversation piece, a fun coffee table addition — the recipes are untested, after all. 

But cooks would be remiss if they ignored some of the compelling and unexpected stories of California’s foodways. Take, for instance, the recipes from then-Governor George Deukmejian and his wife Gloria. Two of their recipes, for Gold Coast shrimp and flank steak, offer a touch of elegant dining with a small nod to California cuisine. (Gloria specifies that the sherry used in marinating the steak is “California sherry.”) But a third recipe, for a savory and tart herbaceous Armenian salad, could have been passed down from their parents and would likely have been in regular rotation for the Deukmejian diet. Both George and Gloria were children of Armenian immigrants, and as governor, George often mentioned how formative his parents’ immigrant story was to his understanding of the American dream. 

The recipe for Joe Carcione’s Neapolitan tomato sauce nods to North Beach’s Italian roots. For more than two decades, Carcione was famous for his presence in radio, newspaper and television as the Green Grocer, a persona he used to educate the public about how to select produce for flavor and nutrition. He could lecture on false indicators of a pineapple’s sweetness (and what signs to really look for) or what health benefits could be gained from eating a fresh tomato. 

Carcione knew his stuff: For decades before the fame, he worked in produce, including at a San Francisco produce market where he would start work by 3 a.m. His recipe and personal note for his tomato sauce evoke his Italian-American beginnings at home in San Francisco: “The above is my favorite recipe, because I can still remember, when I was a little boy, standing by my Father as he cooked up this sauce.”

Internationally renowned artist Ruth Asawa submitted a recipe for a tofu snack — and, in true artistic form, also included a sketch of one of the steps of its preparation. She noted that the simple baked tofu with its miso marinade, topped with cilantro and green onion, was “a childhood snack our Mother made for us.” When I cooked it at home, it was tasty and savory, and it had a slight sweetness after the miso topping caramelized under the broiler. It required few ingredients but nevertheless had a big flavor payoff.

Before Asawa was celebrated for her sculptures or her commitment to art education in San Francisco, she grew up on a farm in Norwalk, California. She and her siblings would leave for school by 7 a.m. and come home around midafternoon, when they would work the fields until 8 p.m. For Asawa, her mother’s tofu snack as momentary relief from the toil of farm life would have been an important memory of home.

The who’s who

Some of the cookbook’s notoriety is not just who was included in it but also their trajectories since its publication. “M. F. K. Fisher was very pleased to see that Anne Lamott was included, because she was a new name,” said Plant. 

San Francisco-born Lamott, now a bestselling author, had launched her writing career only a few years before contributing to the book. In an email, Lamott shared, “I remember being flattered to have been included with such an illustrious group of people. … I had zero money those years.”

Plant says the cookbook may be a product of a bygone San Francisco, when a closer-knit community would rally together and support the arts. 

Fisher alluded to this convivial spirit in the Bay Area, writing as much in a note appended to her recipe for pickled seedless grapes: “I shall always think of [the San Francisco Ballet] as an integral part of all San Francisco life, a vital and important thing. I wish that I could do more to help it in every possible way. … They all want it to live forever, as do I, and if eating well is a part of the San Francisco heritage, what better way to keep the San Francisco Ballet alive than to stay alive ourselves with good food?”