California Cuisine

It’s unclear just who the Louis of Crab Louis salad fame was; perhaps he was affiliated with the Olympic Club in Seattle, where opera star Enrico Caruso, who visited there in 1904, is said to have fallen in love with the crab salad. San Francisco also claims the dish, which reached its zenith there in the teens, as a specialty at Solari’s restaurant and at the St. Francis Hotel.

If you have a set of clay tiles or a baking stone, place it on the oven rack while preheating the oven. It will absorb the heat, and putting a pizza pan or baking sheet directly on top will ensure a crisp crust.

Wolfgang Puck gets the credit for redefining pizza at his trend-setting Spago restaurant in West Hollywood. The inventive pizzas came topped with everything from goat cheese and Black Forest ham to artichokes and exotic mushrooms. Duck sausage pizzas, like this one, were a real hit.

"Last summer we spent a week in Paso Robles, California, and had an excellent dinner at Bistro Laurent," say Rusty and Stacey Willi of Santa Rosa, California. "To our delight, dessert—a warm raspberry clafouti topped with vanilla ice cream—turned out to be one of our favorite vacation memories." This dessert has a more cake-like texture than a traditional clafouti. The version here is even better topped with ice cream.

If you are looking for a chowder that is deeply flavored and hearty but not overly rich, this is it. It's perfect for a casual occasion, but the "meatballs" deliver an element of surprise, along the lines of an optical illusion, and make it really quite special. The idea for this chowder came from an old San Francisco recipe for "Force Meatballs" in a cookbook called Joe Tilden's Recipes for Epicures (1907), reprinted in Richard Hooker's Book of Chowders. The "meatballs" were actually made from crabmeat, a fun idea that I knew had great potential. Tilden, a renowned Bay Area amateur cook, left only these instructions for his meatballs: "Serve in any fish chowder or soup." So I paired my version of his meatballs with a chowder that had flavors similar to cioppino, the famous San Francisco seafood stew flavored with garlic, onions, bell peppers, and tomatoes. I served it to my wife and kids, telling them only that it was "meatball chowder." The well-browned meatballs look like the real thing, so they were all a bit dumbfounded when they tasted them. My son, J.P., said "Wow, they taste like crab cakes!" Everybody loved the chowder!

This recipe originally accompanied Fruit Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing