 I'm honored to be speaking here since the San Francisco Public Library has facilitated so much of my research. So let me start by saying I'm a relatively new arrival to the Bay Area. I've lived here less than 20 years. I read the books that were already out there like Doris Muscatine's Cook's Tour of San Francisco and there's this great book, Sumptuous Dining in Gaslight, San Francisco. So I also read through the city's newspaper archives looking for food terms and I poured over the directories. And this is the results, the San Francisco Food Biography. The two main points I try to make in the book are that San Francisco has always been an international city. It faces out to the Pacific Ocean and it has influences and people who come to it from all over. So the food influences are international. And the second point is that the trends that we sometimes consider new, the interest in fresh local food, the cosmopolitan attitude towards dining. Let's go all the way back to the gold rush. There was a gap of about 60 years in the 20th century when the city was trying to tell a different story about itself and I'll come back to that later in the talk. The city was trying to tell a simpler story and it ended up cutting out a lot of the richness of California's food history. So during the gold rush starting in 1849, you probably know this, many of those who are unable to mine for gold for whatever reason, or who are too wise to mine for gold, they made a good living mining the miners, catering to the miners' desire to consume conspicuously when they were living in San Francisco. Restaurants were a great setting for this because dining in public provides an opportunity to show off what you can afford and you can treat your friends, you can snub your enemies, it's great. So restaurants often served many different kinds of cuisines so people didn't have to choose which one to go to. It was easy to spend $10 which is about $300 for us and our money on dinner out. So let me set the scene with an eyewitness description of the restaurants in gold rush San Francisco by one of the miners who is there. There are eating houses to suit the tastes and pockets of people of all variety of means and of every nation. The eating houses are long buildings with two rows of tables placed parallel to each other, extending the length of the room. The sides and ceilings are covered with calico instead of paper. The bar is at the end of the room, the kitchen is underneath. The fair, so I'm still quoting the minor, the fair is of the most heterogeneous kind, dishes of the most incongruous characters are placed on the table at the same time, boiled and roast meats, salted and potted meats, curries, stews, fish, rice, cheese, frijoles and molasses are served up on small dishes and ranged indiscriminately on the table. This minor, William Shaw, said that all at once a certain hours you would hear a loud beating of gongs and a ringing of bells and everyone would rush to their favorite eatery. Your table mate would pause a moment maybe to take out his quid of chewing tobacco and stick it in his pocket or in his hat or next to his plate and then everyone would start attacking the spread, eating as fast as they could before someone else ate it all and usually they finish their meals in about 10 minutes or less. He added molasses is a favorite fixing and eaten with almost everything. Some of the less refined neither use fork nor spoon, the knife serving to convey to the mouth both liquids and solids with surprising velocity. When dinner was over, you got up to let the next group of hungry folks sit down, you rescued your quid of tobacco from wherever you'd stashed it. And Shaw went on to add that the best eating houses in his opinion are those kept by celestials, that's the Chinese, and the dishes are mostly curries, hashes and fricacies served up in small dishes and they are exceedingly palatable. So that caught my eye, the best eating houses in San Francisco are those kept by celestials, but they were serving steaks and pork chops as often as they were serving anything that we would think of today as Chinese food. One gold rush miner who was there in the summer of 1849 said, some of the eating houses are kept by China men but the vians are served up in true American style with knives, forks and spoons. He praised the coffee at these Chinese-run restaurants and the New York Tribune correspondent Bayard Taylor who was there to report on all the excitement of the gold rush, he agreed that the Chinese were making the best coffee in San Francisco and that they served ordinary English food as well as Chinese food for those who might be intrigued by chow-chow and curry. One of these restaurants was called the Canton on Jackson Street. William Redmond Ryan ate there, he ate at the Canton in 1849 and he was astonished to see the neat arrangement and cleanliness of the place, the excellence of the table and the moderate charges. As I have always been given to understand that these people were of dirty habits, he said, I'm gratified to be able to bear testimony to the injustice of such a sweeping assertion. Chinese restaurants also hosted ground banquets to which they invited newspaper editors, politicians, businessmen, they were trying to build good relations with the white community and they would sit white people, you can see in the slide, they would sit white people with Chinese people, with charming Chinese people to help show them what the foods were and how to use chopsticks and just explain how to eat Chinese food appropriately so that people wouldn't always have to order steaks and pork chops when they're in Chinese restaurants. It turns out that the Chinese in the Pearl River Delta back in China had actually been cooking for Western visitors for 100 years already at this point because there was a lot of trade there and so it's not totally surprising that the ones who came to America were able to transfer those skills to San Francisco. Sadly, I don't have a picture of French restaurants during the gold rush period so we have a little pause here. The French restaurants took a different approach, they were not aiming to make whatever food the customers were used to. Instead, they tried to promote the idea that French food was the best kind of food. French restaurants were mostly along Commercial Street, Clay Street and DuPont Street, Grant Avenue, in what became known as the French Town District of San Francisco for a while. Some of the restaurants had very French names like Les Trois Frères, the Café de Paris, Les Frères Provenceaux, the Maison d'Orais, or things like Napoli and Richelieu that were very associated with the French. But others just put French restaurant over the door and trusted to the customers to figure it out and then there was the famous Poodle Dog which started off as the Union Rotisserie and Restaurant before it got its unusual name. French San Franciscans did sometimes acknowledge their Chinese rivals in the restaurant business. One French booster said in 1854, the Chinese showed up here with their pots and pans and opened the first restaurants but it didn't take us long to overshadow these preparers of birds' nests. The French culinary arts are appreciated all over the world, he said, and even the coarsest taste buds, far off on the Pacific coast, that's us he's talking about, still favor us and enjoy our ways of preparing all sorts of food even with ingredients unfamiliar in France. In the beginning, he says, French canned goods were dispensed prolifically at these restaurants as if they were essential to survival. French restaurants, he said, still serve canned truffled partridge, canned muck turtle soup, and canned peas but now they serve them alongside other local dishes. So these glamorous French restaurants were serving food out of cans at the beginning but they soon established the relationships to get better products locally for most of the ingredients that they needed. Even though French restaurants were at the forefront of the culinary scene, critics sometimes expressed a little anxiety about the quality of the ingredients. Since French cooking involves a lot of elaborate sauces, sometimes people worried that less than fresh food was being disguised in that way. Once one French, no I'm sorry, one non-French restaurant reviewer liked going to French restaurants but he thought that the sleek French chefs with their clean white hats were just covering up for the black, hot, frizzling, frying, odor-laden kitchen in the rear where the actual cooking is done, those are his words. In addition to these Chinese and French restaurants, there were also plain American eateries or boarding houses where people could go to hang out specifically with others who came from the same part of America that they came to. There was a New Jersey house, the Rhode Island house, the New Haven lunch, the St. Louis house, the Oregon house, and soon there were other nationalities getting in on the restaurant scene. There were Mexicans, Italians, Croatians, British, Spanish. Except for the French restaurants, most of them took the eclectic approach that the Chinese restaurants did. They served foods from different cuisines next to each other as if, as long as they didn't look too hard to make. A lot of these restaurants at the beginning did not have menus. You ate whatever the cooks put on the table or you chose maybe they had a board that they would write the today's specials on. And the Ward House, thank goodness for the Ward House, in December of 1849 they actually did have a printed menu. So we have some sense of what people might have been able to eat in these restaurants. It lists oxtail soup for a dollar, steak for a dollar, roast pork with applesauce for $1.25, baked trout and anchovy sauce for $1.50, under extras in the middle, fresh California eggs each a dollar, a jelly omelet down below under this rum omelet for $3 and a jelly omelet is $2. So on these expensive eggs, people often have heard about hangtown fry and I want to explain its history because it's a great Gold Rush story and lots of San Francisco restaurants now offer the dish. It's basically a scramble of eggs and oysters sometimes with bacon too. So what's the big deal? Well these were foods that you could not get out in mining countries so that's what the miners when they were digging in the mines they were dreaming of this. They could get dried or canned oysters maybe but they couldn't get fresh oysters and eggs were outrageously expensive in mining country. They were expensive in San Francisco, $1 each but in mining country this is before Petaluma was going you might have to pay $2 or $3 per each egg. There's a story that hangtown fry is invented by a convicted criminal who's thinking about the most obscure ingredients he can come up with for his last supper to postpone his execution. As far as I can tell that's a 20th century story there's no evidence that there was a real criminal like that but it's a great story and it conveys this idea that the ingredients were so hard to get out in mining country and I think the reason the tourists like ordering hangtown fry today is the high cost of living in the Bay Area or visiting the Bay Area becomes easier to face when you consider the miners paying out their hard-won gold for an overpriced oyster scramble. That's what I think. During gold rush days San Francisco had a lot more men than women. It was quite an adventure getting out here and respectable women might think twice before heading out to such a rough and ready town where most of the streets were unpaved and they turned to mud pretty quickly. When restaurants or bars could find women to serve as hostesses that brought in business but the joke was that they had better exploit that advantage quickly because the woman would probably be buried off within a week. So you can you can see the women there the hostesses of this lunch the three women in the back there. Most saloons relied on free lunch to bring in customers if they couldn't get women or even if they did have women. Saloons were not allowed to offer free drinks and charge for food but they could charge for drinks and put out a free spread of breads, sandwich meats, cheeses, various kinds of hash and usually green turtle soup or clam chowder as well as some salty extras like pickles olives and nuts to encourage people to get thirsty and order some more drinks and pay for some more drinks. Despite the salty food some people came in for their free lunch and did not buy a drink loafers they were called. You were supposed to buy a drink in order to enjoy the food but certain kinds of loafers were considered better than others. With the mining excitement in the city the city felt that there was a culture of speculation and they embraced that culture. If you were lucky today you might be out of luck tomorrow so there was a feeling of fellowship for those who couldn't currently afford to pay for their meal and the saloons were happier to tolerate people who had been good spenders before even if they weren't right now in the theory that maybe they would be in the future when their luck turned. If you wore out your welcome at the free lunch buffet by not getting your luck turned around soon enough you could buy street food and that was pretty cheap. San Francisco became known for its tamale vendors in the late 1880s and 1890s and they would call out to passers by tamales, tamales, fresh tamales to let everyone know what these things were. The Chronicle reported that the tamale is eaten in a small way by persons of all classes in this city though a certain recklessness is often necessary before one can make up one's mind to such a repast. Robert Putnam who is the founder of the California Chicken Tamale Company he decided to send his vendors out in these clean white uniforms rather in the more traditional Mexican outfits that other tamale vendors were wearing this way they would seem more hygienic because people were starting to worry about just like with the French and Chinese restaurants what ingredients are in these tamales exactly but somehow seeing someone in a clean outfit made you think that they actually had chicken in their chicken tamale. This saloon is mostly famous for being the birthplace of Pisco Punch. From gold rush days ships came to San Francisco around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America as I mentioned before as they passed Peru ships would restock there at the port of Pisco and one of the things that they would get would be the Peruvian white grape brandy which was called Pisco after the port that it came from. Pisco brandy had a very harsh edge to it it was suitable at the time for the frontier town that was San Francisco during these gold rush days but at the end of the gold rush a second wave of mining wealth hit San Francisco. There's the discovery of silver over in the comp stock load in Nevada. The city's gold rush dining cuisine had been rough as I've described with people putting losses over everything and eating with knives rough like the Pisco brandy but in the 1860s this new influx of money and investment in these silver mines created a more sophisticated urban culture and in this more sophisticated era in the 1880s of actually Duncan Nicholl who's the the man in the tie in the dark suit all the way on the left of the photo. He was he ran the the bark the bank exchange saloon and he popularized a much smoother way to drink this Pisco brandy named Pisco Punch. The Chronicle was reminiscing in 1920 about the wonderful days of the bank exchange saloon and Pisco Punch. Ladies used to enter the side portals of the bank exchange with a thrill of unholy delight and they would drink one or even two Pisco Punches. That was not regarded as drinking in the common or garden sense of the term but just seeing life like eating chop suey in Chinatown. So I love I love that quote. So if you drank Pisco Punch you could tell that it had some simple syrup in it it had lemon juice it had pineapple syrup that was not hard to tell it had pineapple chunks in it that's easy to tell. So other bars were soon serving their own version of the famous Pisco Punch but nobody could figure out how Nicholl smoothed out the roughness of the brandy how he really made it so delightfully smooth going down and then had a kick when it after it got down. So I can speak up for historians a historian is the person who tracked down the missing ingredients in 1973 gum arabic which is made from the sap of the acacia tree and John Lannis who is the man who told who revealed this secret he had been a manager at the bank exchange saloon under Nicholl and maybe Nicholl gave him the formula or maybe Lannis just sort of paid attention and noticed that there were supplies of gum arabic that were being dropped off. So as I said during this Comstock load period starting in the 1860s and 70s there's this big burst of cash and financial excitement in the city. People were seizing opportunities to invest in whatever silver mines seemed really hot that week insiders with inside information made the most money of course but many people made enough to feel rich for a time. Some of the people who made a great deal of money were the ones who had run the auction lunch restaurant in the financial district that had opened all the way back in 1849 but it really became a hip place to eat lunch in the 1860s and all the mining insiders would eat there. The restaurant's back door opened on to the famous Washington market which is the largest market in the city at that time and it was a great source for luscious cheeses and a wide assortment of fishmongers and butchers and dealers and game and poultry the freshest produce peas lettuce celery radishes cauliflower tomatoes leeks parsnips and many more even in the winter this market had everything. The owners of the auction lunch William O'Brien and James Flood they kept their ears open and when they thought someone had some useful information about what which mines were doing really well they encouraged him to drink freely they bought him drinks and they encouraged him to speak freely where they might be able to hear him. O'Brien and Flood traded on the information that they learned and they became some of the richest people in San Francisco. Daniel O'Connor who's one of the founders of the Bohemian Club he loved the San Francisco restaurant scene during this period. There's a charm about the restaurant life of San Francisco possessed by no other city on the continent he wrote in 1891. It is a mosaic with a dozen Italian restaurants with their pungent odors not even in Paris is there a greater variety of French restaurants Germany Spain Mexico Portugal China Japan all offered to their wandering children those dishes which are associated with the land of their birth. But of course everyone got to eat in all these different restaurants trying each other's cuisine. O'Connell the Bohemian Club founder he loved eating in good company and he went so far as to say solitary dining is slow death there are those who can bear it just as those who just as there are those who can bear vegetarianism but they are the exceptions. But some of these French restaurants like the Poodle Dog they began to try to differentiate themselves from the crowd offering a higher class experience offering expensive imported wines elaborate dishes and seating people with just their own party not at big communal tables. And here's a picture of the dining room you see people on little tables these French restaurants served dishes like pâté de foie gras l'Astrasbourg, riz de veau piqué au champignon, filet de sol à la colbert and some very fine Bordeaux and burgundy wines. These French restaurants had another attraction from many of San Franciscans they were famous as or infamous maybe as a place where you could take your mistress to. They had private rooms as well as this communal dining room these private rooms you could eat without being seen together in public just a little room with a piano in the corner so you could entertain yourself it actually comes out that occasionally wives asked to go to these private rooms as well because that way they could get something of an adventure they could try these luxurious meals without risking a scandal nice women did not go out to eat in public restaurants much in the 19th century but sometimes they did go out and they just didn't get caught doing it when these restaurants became known for having private suites upstairs there's a actual bedroom upstairs at the restaurant there's they had a whole floor of bedrooms the chronicle said ladies have you ever heard of the poodle dog this is 1869 this quote that is the charming and seductive haunts where your husbands spend their evenings when they say that they have to attend a mining meeting at the poodle dog they indulge in elegant and expensive suppers with the choicest cooking and the rarest wines and fast women here's the the well-stocked cellar at the poodle dog you can see the little poodle dog in the right corner he has a champagne bottle he's going to enjoy himself too despite the occasional scandals it was a good time for eating out in san francisco these were the really good days of san francisco the transcontinental railroad the discovery of the comstock and the opening of the sutro tunnel these were the times when dame fortune made a millionaire of a man today only to make him a popper tomorrow men made their money easily and spent it in the same way the best of everything the world produced was at their order they could pay for it men who a few years before were satisfied with pork and beans bacon and hard bread they became good livers they became educated but there was only one poodle dog but that's of course in the poodle dog brochure so one story from 1870 he described a man who had a grand meal at the poodle dog fried soul chicken liver brochette a fillet of beef and champignon an omelette au confiture and together all that with a bottle of claret unfortunately after he finished his supper with a nice little cup of café noir he experienced the disagreeable sensation of discovering he only had six bits left after paying for his dinner about 75 cents so this is a story not a not a report but french restaurants had this image as an upscale place to eat worth spending your very last dollars on since surely your luck would then turn around and you would become rich again unfortunately when the city's luck changed again it was for the worse with the terrible earthquake and fire of 1906 in the early 20th century san francisco becomes known for other foods than this cosmopolitan cuisine that i've been talking about san francisco becomes known for fishermen's warf specialties like crab louis and chipino and for touristy chinatown dishes like chop suey and for sourdough bread with that distinctive sour taste but none of those tastes as far as my research shows none of those tastes go back to the 19th century in san francisco they all became popular after the earthquake when the city is desperately trying to come up with a simple evocative way of selling the city to the tourist industry and simplifying the food story so it sounded different from what you would get in boston or new york or new orleans or anywhere else coming up with distinctive dishes that were just for san francisco that was part of this marketing effort so crab louis chipino chop suey sourdough i'm i'm saying that these became associated with san francisco right at this moment for marketing reasons north and italians from genoa came to san francisco they had a talent for fishing and they liked eating fish stew they called it chupin the first mention in the san francisco press of this dish came in stories about this colorful italian fishermen community there's a reporter in 1901 who spent a day with the italian fishermen in search of this colorful kind of story and she gets the honor of being the very first person to try to spell chipino in an english paper english language newspaper she writes it ciaspini c-h-e-s-p-i-n-i but you can tell that's it's the same dish because she gives a recipe for it she went on to say it tastes much better than it sounds and that if you go out on a fishing boat if you're not actually feeling ill you should definitely have some but the way she describes it makes it sound like her readership the people reading the san francisco chronicle in 1901 would not have known about this dish she's introducing them to it another dish that became associated with san francisco after the earthquake is sourdough bread and this is the biggest surprise for me in doing the research for this book our miners the california miners do not make sourdough bread they are never very far from a civilization there are traders going back and forth they have baking soda they make fried bread they make pancakes they make all sorts of things but they do not take the time to make sourdough bread there's other miners the clondike miners of the 1890s these are up in alaska and they are very remote they are very far from civilization and they do have to keep their sourdough starter in special pots that they wear underneath their clothes so they don't freeze absolutely the story is true it's just not in california these alaskan miners are nicknamed sourdough's and jack london writes about them that way in his novels so people all over america became familiar with the idea of miners as sourdough's which is how this this infection happened that they are miners were sourdough's but our miners are not sourdough's the second problem with the myth is that nobody talks about a special san francisco taste to the bread in the 19th century as far as i can tell and i've been looking there's a chronicle story on the city's bread industry from 1904 and this is the first time that i can find anyone talking about that special delicious taste french bread is entirely different from italian bread both are sourdough breads and should taste sour although the french italian loaves look much alike the french man works his bread more and makes a springier loaf these french loaves are quite tough are filled with large holes and are so far as i can tell confined to san francisco i've offered 50 cents for a loaf of it in new york it can't be got it's not made in seattle in portland nor in to coma there may be a stray baker of it in los angeles or sacramento but that's all it's san francisco and only san francisco so i love running across this this is the first time anyone has said in print that san francisco had a special sour french bread that was worth going to san francisco just to try it out so you can use sourdough techniques to make your bread taste however you like in the 19th century if your sourdough techniques led to a sour tasting bread people criticized you you had done it wrong but i think over time in san francisco the the climate and the bacteria in the air did slowly change the taste a little bit so that somebody who was an expert at bread would taste something special in the bread but nobody else was really noticing but once they needed a way to market the city because of the earthquake and two this guy had said that there was a special taste and the other bakers obviously picked up on that then they started amping up the sourness of the bread because it's you can do that you can make it taste however you like and so by the 1930s we have two different kinds of bread we have the same bakeries will sell a french bread and a sourdough bread but before that i can't even before the 1930s i can't find um places that say they offer both i just see them offering french bread and in the 20th century early 20th century people say it's delicious sour french bread but i don't see that in the 19th century so to conclude my point just to come back around to what i was saying at the beginning in the 19th century san francisco had this very cosmopolitan approach to dining but after the earthquake the food story becomes simplified and dumbed down to be explained easily to tourist magazines and that's how we end up with just a few dishes representing all of san francisco until in the 1960s 70s the city gets beyond that simple story and starts to find new ways of selling the city with things like california cuisine and also the mission and mission burritos and little manila and the filmore district and many other parts of the city get brought out for the for their cuisine instead of just fisherman's wharf in china town and sourdough bread thank you for your attention you've been a great audience