THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXXI V > NUMBER I > WINTER 2 019 ff Randall Tarpey-Schwed : Taco Californica f Cynthia Graubart : M.F.K. Fisher: An Appreciation f Ellen Langer : To Inverness, with Love f Henry Voigt : Twain's Feast Revisited STomNealon : Red Mayo f Book Recommendations : Janice Braun, Leon Fine, Gail Jones, Robert McCamant & David Wingfield Pettus the bookclub of California is a non-profit member and donor supported organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of the book and the book arts, with a focus on California and the West. Founded in 1912, the club supports book making, fine printing, design, typography, illustration, literature, and scholarship through a dynamic series of publications, public programs, and exhibitions. Membership in the Book Club of California is open to all. New memberships are accepted throughout the year. Members renew on an annual basis. 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OFFICERS President: Randall Tarpey-Schwed Vice-President: Gail Jones Secretary: LaurelleSwan Treasurer: Robert Bothamley DIRECTORS WHOSE TERMS EXPIRE IN 2019 Marie Dern, Sharon Gee, Laurelle Swan, Kathleen Walkup DIRECTORS WHOSE TERMS EXPIRE IN 2020 Mary Austin, Robert Bothamley, Dr. Leon Fine, Gail Jones, Kenneth Karmiole DIRECTORS WHOSE TERMS EXPIRE IN 2021 Norman Clayton, Peter Farquhar, Robin Heyeck, Robert Kittle, Randall Tarpey-Schwed COMMITTEE CHAIRS Development & Membership: Kenneth Karmiole Executive: Randall Tarpey-Schwed f 1 nanc e : Robert Bothamley Library: Dr. Leon Fine Programs: Sharon Gee Publications: Kathleen Walkup STAFF Executive Director:KevinKosik Membership & Operations Director: Lesya Westerman Programs & Publications Coordinator:QuynhNguyen Librarian : Elizabeth Newsom PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE Kathleen Walkup, chair Michael Carabetta Robert McCamant KateMitas Victoria Shoemaker EDITORS OF THIS ISSUE Supervising Editor: Kathleen Walkup Guest Editors: Kate Mitas and Lizzy Young Managing Editor: Kevin Kosik Copyright 2019 by the Book Club of California, 312 Sutter St., Suite 500, San Francisco, California 94108. This issue of the Book Club of California’s Quarterly is set in Mark von Bronkhorst’s Verdigris, and was designed and printed by Richard Seibert, printer. Cover illustration by Michael Schwab © 2018 From the Supervising Editor Kathleen Walkup Last week I visited friends whom I hadn’t seen for many years.'They were mildly complaining about the small size of their kitchen — obviously the kitchen of dedicated cooks — but one solution that had not occurred to them was to clear out their impressive collection of cookbooks, which took up at least half the wall space and spilled out onto the floor. And why would it? Books and food create a synergy that is undeniable. I suppose there are booklovers without a library of cookbooks, but that is difficult to contemplate. In this issue of the Quarterly we celebrate cookbooks, their authors and the foods they memorialize. Guest editors (and antiquarian booksellers) Lizzy Young and Kate Mitas have concocted a tasty mixture of articles celebrating everything from the taco (our own Randy Tarpey-Schwed) to the oyster and the wolf (the incomparable M.F.K. Fisher, whose works are remembered here by cookbook author Cynthia Graubart). UC Berkeley professor Ellen Langer’s tribute to the cookbook of the legendary (and now sadly gone) Manka’s Czech restaurant in Inverness takes me back to the days of dining in that warm, enveloping space in the midst of the coastal woods, the air redolent of slow- cooked meats and rich, filling sauces. A Mark Twain feast (offered up by menu collector Henry Voigt) and the ongoing bout between red sauces (Russian and Thousand Island in this case) by bookseller and condiment aficionado Tom Nealon round out our menu. We also include more book recommendations. (Who doesn’t love a good bibliomystery? Or for that matter, Venice?) When you’re ready to take a break from food but not from books, these reviews will keep you reading. y y y One quick mea culpa from Michael Gorman, one of the reviewers from our Fall issue, who apologizes for mixing Kevin Starr (whom he meant to cite) with Kenneth Starr. According to Gorman, even Ringo Starr would have been a better slip. 4 Tlie Book Club of California Quarterly The Book Club of California Quarterly 5 Taco Californica Randall Tarpey-Schwed Food lovers owe a debt of gratitude to our New World brothers and sisters who gave us such indispensable agricultural products as tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, and vanilla. Ironically, many of those New World products were so thoroughly adopted by Europeans that they are no longer associated with the New World. Try to imagine southern Italian cuisine without the tomato; or Swiss or Belgian chocolate without the cocoa bean; or French pastry without vanilla. But the two foods that seem to have retained their “New-World-ness” are maize and chiles, which are the essential ingredients for a taco. In my early childhood, tacos defined Mexican cuisine. My mother was gastronomically adventurous but constrained by both her own experience and by our local supermarket’s ingredients. For me, tacos meant pre-formed shells filled with ground beef that had been cooked up with McCormick’s Taco Seasoning Mix. As I remember it, McCormick’s blend was excessively flavored with cumin, which is actually a Middle-Eastern spice that was later adopted by Mexicans; and with paprika, a Hungarian spice derived from New World chiles that nobody thinks of as a Mexican spice. It was the paprika that gave the juice from my mother’s slightly greasy taco filling its peculiar orange color. Our tacos were always topped with chopped iceberg lettuce and diced tomatoes. Sometimes we added shredded cheddar cheese. That was it. My taco tastes have since evolved. The origins of the word taco are murky. The term appears to have been first used in Mexican silver mines in the 18th century, and it referred to the small charges used to extract ore. “Tacos” were little pieces of paper wrapped around gunpowder and inserted into holes drilled into the rock face. The shape of those charges must have been remarkably similar to what we now call a rolled-taco, or taquito. The word didn’t become associated with a food product until the 19 th century. Although tacos got off to a slow start, this simple Mexican dish was adopted by the European-American citizens of California with remarkable vigor and enthusiasm. Despite California’s Spanish and Mexican origins, surprisingly few Spanish language cookbooks have been published in California. The first example was Encarnacion Pinedo’s El Cocinero Espanol (San Francisco: E.C. Hughes, 1898). Dan Strehl, the pioneering bibliographer of California food and wine books, identified El Cocinero Espanol as the first cookbook printed in Spanish in California, the first with a significant number of recipes from Mexico and Latin America, and the first cookbook that comprehensively demonstrated the 6 Tlie Book Clut> of California Quarterly Mexican food preparation techniques that were being employed in California. This rare volume contains a whopping one-thousand recipes, but Senora Pinedo’s book doesn’t have even a single recipe for a taco. A few of the writers of California’s earliest English language cookbooks included sections dedicated to Mexican dishes, but their Mexican recipes were almost always referred to as “Spanish” dishes, and were often lumped into a section that included all foreign foods. The irony of a California cookery imprint labeling a Mexican recipe as “foreign” is, of course, immense. Yet within that irony, one detects early affection for the cuisine. The first cookbook that was published in Los Angeles, aptly named Los Angeles Cookery (Los Angeles: Mirror Printing and Binding House, 1881) was compiled by the ladies of the Fort Street Methodist Episcopal Church from donated recipes in order to raise funds to payoff the church’s mortgage. Among the recipes are several attributed to “Mrs. Downey”, including one for a spicy “Zalza” that wouldn’t be out of place in a trendy upscale taqueria today. Mrs. Downey had been born Maria de Jesus Jacinta Guirado, the daughter of a prominent Mexican family, and had risen to become the First Lady of California when her husband John G. Downey succeeded to the governorship in i860. Her husband founded the town of Downey, which is perhaps best known as being the birthplace of the pop music superstars Richard and Karen Carpenter. The Carpenters of Downey were known taco-lovers, but apparently the ladies of the Fort Street Methodist Episcopal Church were not, as their cookbook doesn’t have a single recipe for tacos in its “Spanish” section. And tacos didn’t even appear in the first English language cookbook that was entirely dedicated to Mexican cuisine. May Southworth’s One-hundred and one Mexican Dishes (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1906). Southworth’s gorgeous cookbook, which was designed by John Henry Nash and printed bytheTomoye Press, did in fact include 101 recipes, but not a single one for tacos. It wasn’t until 1914 that a recipe for a taco first showed up in an American cookbook. Improbably, the publisher of the first taco recipe was a Midwestern housewife turned domestic lecturer named Bertha Haffner-Ginger. After winning a gold medal for baking at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Bertha toured the country giving lectures, and she arrived in Los Angeles in 1911. The Los Angeles Times quickly hired her to head up their newly formed School of Domestic Science, and during a lunchtime stroll near the Times' downtown offices she stumbled into the barrio of Sonoratown and the tortilla factory of Elias & Guzman. Bertha was mesmerized as she watched the women inside the factory making fresh tortillas, enchiladas and tamales, and that experience initiated her love affair with Mexican cuisine. In 1914 she published California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book (Los Angeles: Citizen Print Shop). Bertha’s taco recipe The Book Club of California Quarterly 7 is simple, involving just a bit of meat inside a folded tortilla that is fried in oil and topped with chile sauce, but her proto-taco was the first “Taco Californica”. The many manifestations of our 21st century tacos reflect the adventurousness of a food-obsessed world that has been shrunken by the ease of travel, the availability of diverse ingredients, and an openness to new culinary ideas. I have enjoyed thousands of tacos which were variously filled with beef, chicken, pork, shrimp, duck, crab, or fish that was raw, cooked or fermented; garnished with salsas, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, cheeses, and crema; nearly always seasoned with chiles, but often with other delicious spices and herbs; and served in tortillas that were crispy and soft, and made of corn, wheat, rice, wontons, and even thinly sliced jicama. In short, Taco Californica has evolved into hundreds of subspecies of taco, and while I know that neither Encarnacion Pinedo nor Bertha Haffner- Ginger would recognize many of our modern tacos as Mexican dishes, each of those tacos owe their delicious heritage to the genius idea that our Mexican sisters and brothers had to simply wrap a tortilla around a delicious filling. As a tribute to Taco Californica, and to its Mexican heritage, here is Bertha’s recipe: T^tCO Made by putting chopped cooked beef and chile sauce in Tortilla made of meal and flour; folded, edges sealed together with egg; fried in deep fat, chile sauce served over it. Randall Tarpey-Schwed is President of The Book Club of California and the co¬ author of M.F.K. Fisher: An Annotated Bibliography (CreateSpace, 2013). 8 The Boole Club of California Quarterly M.F.K. Fisher: An Appreciation Cynthia Graubart She was quirky, independent, opinionated, self-absorbed, and she possessed a gift for exploring human appetites. Authoring thirty books, and writing nearly one hundred articles, columns, and stories for publication across five decades, Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher (M.F.K. Fisher) was a prolific producer of food for thought, crossing the genres of novels, travel, cooking, memoir, and essay, and she even had a stint as a writer for Paramount in Hollywood. Her writing is as relevant today as ever, says Celia Sack of Omnivore Books in San Francisco, California, “and her books are vital to building a collection of important food writing.” Don Lindgren, of Rabelais Books in Biddeford, Maine says, “She positioned herself within the subject, and made the writing as much about her as about the food. This set the tone for so much of American food writing that’s come since, and she’s had a huge impact on food writers today, even many who have not read her work owe her a debt.” Fisher wrote about the pleasures of the table, mixing hunger, sex, love, family, and a sense of place, addressing the broad sense of hunger while peppering the pages with tidbits of her own life and loves. Shy in outward appearance, and self-deprecating on occasion, she claimed “The only thing I know how to do besides cook and love a few people is to write.” Juggling the demands of caregiver, wife, and later a single mother, she supported herself and her daughters on her income from writing. She was a spectacular correspondent, writing an estimable 15,000 letters in her lifetime, exchanging the details of her personal and professional life with close friends and family. She wrote candidly about her life, her struggles, and her writing. She, like most authors, had mixed feelings about her agents, publisher, and finished works. She claimed to not care about money, but clearly needed an income to raise her family and fund her travel abroad. Biographers and friends have enriched our understanding of this complex woman in books including Poets of the Appetites by Joan Reardon (New York: North Point Press, 2004) and Between Friends: M.F.K. Fisher and Me by Jeannette Ferrary (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), and have shared her personal record in M.F.K. Fisher: A Life in Letters, Correspondence 1929-1991; Selected and compiled by Norah K. Barr, Marsha Moran, Patrick Moran (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998). The bibliography compiled by Donald Zealand and Randall Tarpey-Schwed (M.F.K. Fisher: An Annotated Bibliography, 2013, revised edition) is the definitive bibliography of Fisher’s The Book Club of California Quarterly 9 works and includes listings of not only Fisher’s books, but her short stories, articles, essays, introductions to others’ books, and books Fisher reviewed in print. True aficionados will relish the secondary source listings including references to and about Fisher along with articles and obituaries about her and notations of theses and dissertations covering Fisher’s works. These books served me well as source material for this article. Published to mostly favorable reviews, Fisher’s first book. Serve it Forth (New York, London: Harper, 1937), was called a delightful book by The New York Times: “It is erudite and witty and experienced and young. The truth is that it is stamped on every page with individuality.” Harper's Monthly published excerpts before the publication date, and the public eagerly awaited the book’s June 1937 publication. As for Fisher, she claimed in a letter that “I know very little of the book, but after reams of good reviews, and the enthusiastic letters from relatives who have been trying to get it for two weeks at Macy’s or who had been told that Robinson’s sold out three times, I was surprised and disappointed to get a letter from Harper’s... quoting sales 22 copies one week, 34 another, and so on. Someone must have read the damned book—or is that what is called succes d’estime?” She dedicated the book to her parents, Rex and Edith, but little notice was paid to her by them for her first book. As with most collections, obtaining an author’s first book is key and as Lindgren says, “An author’s first book is always an interesting window into their outlook. Market pressures and preconceived notions of editors and publishers are brought less to bear on the first book. And first books are recognized as interesting by most collectors, so the book will likely remain desirable when other fashions may change. I would almost always include the first book on any such list.” Fisher’s second published book, a novel typical of the time titled Touch and Go by Victoria Berne (pseudonym of M.F.K. Fisher and Dillwyn Parrish), (New York and London: Harper, 1939), was a collaboration between Fisher and her soon-to-be second husband, Dillwyn Parrish. A breezy light romance with better descriptions of the scenery than anything else, it was better received by the public than the critics. Fisher wrote in a letter to close friend Larry Powell “our book comes out in May—awful trash, but entertaining for hammock-trade — we hope it will make piles of dough.” She later wrote again to Powell, after reading lackluster reviews, referring to the novel as “futile but entertaining... Don’t waste 2 dollars on it. If I ever get a free copy I’ll send it to you. I think ours went to Switzerland [from where she had recently moved].” Often difficult to find, Lindgren notes that “it’s largely overlooked even by people who care about Fisher and her writing.” Fisher’s next book, Consider the Oyster (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), a slim volume, with just twenty-eight recipes, contains often witty and The Book Club of California Quarterly 10 insightful descriptions of the loved and loathed bivalve. Although Gourmet rejected printing three chapters from it in the magazine prior to the book’s publication, Consider the Oyster was met with praise and attention. Reardon writes in Poet of the Appetites, “She blends oyster lore and personal experience with abandon, and shares her stories, her memories of stories told to her, and her recipes the same way she would share a tureen of oyster bisque, generously ladling out a ‘lusty bit of nourishment.’These stories are as much about comfort, warmth, and love as they are about food.” In the days and weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, residents of the West Coast felt an attack would be imminent on the southern California coast. Fisher set about to write about preparing for and surviving wartime. Some articles appeared in the Whittier News, where they later became the start of How to Cook a Wolf( New York: Duel, Sloan and Pearce, 1942). Years later, the critic Walter Kendricks wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1996, “Fisher thought well enough of both food and writing to perfect a hybrid genre, starting with Consider the Oyster and How to Cook a Wolf, that gently folded recipes in to stories... Her highest praise for any dish, from bread and cheese to truffles, was to declare it good.” The Gastronomical Me (New York: Duel, Sloan and Pearce, 1943) followed How to Cook A Wolf just a year later, written while Fisher was in seclusion to hide an unwed pregnancy. Telling even her family she was writing for a government war office, she worked feverishly on the autobiographical book. Sheila Hibben wrote in the Weekly Book Review, “One may disagree with an occasional passage in The G astronomical Me, but I can imagine no two opinions about Mrs. Fisher’s style. The brilliance, the bite, the flexibleness that distinguished Serve it Forth are apparent in this latest work, which also marks an increase in the author’s technical virtuosity.” It’s hard to believe seventy-five years have passed since its publication as Fisher so embodies our image of a modern food writer. For this particular title, collectors are interested in the true first edition where the author’s photo on the original dust jacket, taken by the glamour photographer George Hurrell, depicted Fisher in a reclining, seductive pose. Deemed too racy, the book was recalled and a new jacket issued, this time with a more traditional author photo. Her collection of historical meals found in literature. Here Let us Feast: A Book of Banquets (New York: Viking, 1946) met with great acclaim for Fisher as a writer and researcher. Written while under pressure to run a household suitable for visiting family and friends and a ‘menagerie of dogs and cats,’ Fisher found it difficult to finish the manuscript and once published, she wrote to Powell, “I have no feeling about it, except a profound relief that it’s done with. It was, for many unavoidable reasons, a tiring and even unpleasant task.”