#25 | 🦀 The Definitive Cioppino Recipe
Top ten recipes in 2020
Hello!
It’s our last newsletter of the year, but we’ll be back on Saturday, January 2, 2021. With Dungeness crab season on the horizon (December 23 is the opener for commercial fishing), we’re throwing it back to 2016 and John Birdsall’s sublime celebration of San Francisco’s signature dish, cioppino. Birdsall is also the author of the much heralded The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, a review of which is also included below.
Btw, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. You're getting this email because you subscribed. If you'd like to hop off at anytime, simply unsubscribe. I appreciate you reading this newsletter.
EAT
The Signal Things of San Francisco: Cioppino by John Birdsall
The man on the stool next to mine at Tadich is big and blotchy, staring down a hamburger steak camouflaged by onions on a thick oval plate. He’s propped a tablet computer open to email on the bar in front of him, and he’s halfway through his first Pinot Noir when he notices the waiter set down my lunch, a platter-sized bowl with a pair of garlic-toast appendages.
“Ah, cioppino,” Mr. Hamburger Steak says admiringly. “You can never go wrong with that.”
If only this were true.
Cioppino is a native San Francisco dish nobody in restaurants really understands or gets right. Maybe that’s because history makes us think of high school tests with date fields to fill in. Maybe it’s that a lot of San Franciscans—for a couple of generations now—grew up in Ohio or New Jersey, with no memory of North Beach nonnas or friends’ dads cooking cioppino at big messy parties they were forced to endure as kids, bored and slightly grossed out by shells and sloppy fingers. Whatever the reasons, cioppino these days is as troubled as California’s Dungeness crab fishery, bumped into a toxic state of shittiness via the algae of neglect, in a warming ocean of historical obscurity.
Boatloads of variations exist, but at heart, cioppino is some combination of Dungeness crab, mollusk and fin fish, quickly cooked in a heavily tomatoed braise with wine and aromatics. That’s it: messy to eat; reliant on the local Dungeness haul and canned tomatoes; super simple—it’s surprising anyone could fuck it up. But restaurants have applied all kinds of heinousness to cioppino, and for decades.
Continue reading The Signal Things of San Francisco: Cioppino and check out the accompanying recipe for Mae's San Francisco Dungeness Crab Cioppino of which Birdsall says: Cioppino is properly a home dish, or not even a dish but a big, seasonal gesture that should last hours and stain shirts and leave fingers stinky for a day or more, even after frictional washing.
Bon appétit!
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DRINK
Ashanta 2020 'Nouveau' Carignan-Zinfandel California
Chenoa Ashton-Lewis, a 5th generation Oaklander and 3rd generation Sonoma County grape farmer, and Will Basanta, a film maker whose credits include Chef’s Table, stumbled into winemaking in 2019 when they got word that a 50-year-old vineyard planted by Ashton-Lewis’ grandparents in the early 1970s was still full of unsold grapes that survived the 2017 Nuns Fire. They made their first barrel of wine, picking half a ton of grapes themselves and conjuring the juice into an experimental Syrah and Pinot Noir late harvest in an open barrel co-ferment inside a tent.
This year they connected with vineyard neighbor Tony Coturri who knew Ashton-Lewis’ grandfather and planted vines on Sonoma Mountain at the same time back in the 1970s as they were a part of a small collective of grape growers in Sonoma Valley who were organically growing grape vines before the practice became more wide-spread.
Mentored by Caleb Leisure and working with Tony at the Coturri Winery, they’ve released their first full vintage which includes the 2020 Huzzah! Pet Nat of Colombard, a 2020 Ashanta Sidra! Apple/Cider Coferment, and this 2020 Nouveau of Carignan & Zinfandel. The carignan is sourced from a 74-year-old dry farmed, certified biodynamic + organic vineyard farmed by Maria Testa in Mendocino, and a 25-year-old vineyard farmed with organic practices by Sheila Bush in the Sierra Foothills supplied the zinfandel.
Ashton-Lewis notes that Ashanta Wines are zero-zero wines, unfined, unfiltered, with no SO2 additions, and fermented on native yeast at the Coturri Winery.
This “Noveau” is aptly named as it’s racy, juicy and bright. In other words, totally quaffable and best served slightly chilled. Cheers!
We purchased this wine at Fig & Thistle Market.
THINK
The 1 % Ca-Ching-Ring-A-Dingy
The French Laundry is stacking an awful lot of cheddars: Who wanna bet us, that we don’t touch lettuce, stack cheddars forever, live treacherous, all the et ceteras… —Jay Z in Dead Presidents II
The French Laundry reportedly received more than $2.4 million through the Paycheck Protection Program while smaller, less-renowned restaurants struggled to get approval at all from the federal program designed to help small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic, an ABC7 News analysis showed. Matthew Tom in The French Laundry reportedly received over $2.4 million in PPP funds for SF Gate
Meanwhile…
Laurie Thomas, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, said the unexpected early closure of outdoor dining in San Francisco was devastating to the industry.
Thomas personally laid off 52 employees at her two Cow Hollow establishments, Rose's Cafe and Terzo, and she said other restaurants in the city let go of tens of thousands of workers. She wishes the city had chosen to follow the state's lead and this would have given restaurants at least two additional weeks to operate, resulting in at least an extra $1,300 in the pockets of minimum wage workers. —Amy Graff in Tacolicious owner on shutdown: 'There's a real crisis going on in the restaurant business' for SF Gate
Plus, what everyone else is saying: Did we really need to shut down outdoor dining in the Bay Area? Scientists weigh in.
Time to Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
I came here to tell you that if you are not in the restaurant industry, you are seriously underestimating the number of restaurants that are on the brink of closing in the next 14-30 days. There are a few of them that are doing well, but the majority are in grave and imminent danger. If you can afford to, get take-out, get delivery. Buy gift cards if you want.
When restaurants close, the comments on the post are ALWAYS full of people saying things like “If I had known my favorite spot was in trouble I would have ordered more.” This is me telling you: your favorite spots are in trouble this very second. Don’t wait to step up your take-out and delivery game. This it the time folks. Now through the next few months do everything you can if you want to visit those spots after the pandemic. Cultura Carmel Restaurant, Carmel, CA
We’ve added some new restaurants to the list of GoFundMe fund raisers, beginning with Underdogs Too (which is right next to Avenues on Taraval) where a fire destroyed the kitchen and the rest of the interior. Contribute if you can.
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What’s Cooking?
Top ten recipes according to Google search in 2020. We did not make a single one of these.
Whipped coffee (aka Dalgona coffee)
Dole Whip (another Disney recipe)
DoubleTree cookie (seems people really miss staying in hotels)
Chaffle (had to look that one up, it’s a cheese waffle?)
Hamburger bun (makes sense, most buns at retail are dreadful)
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The Pork and Ham Jam Called Spam
When we want to treat ourselves, we get the spam musubi from Avenues (Taraval at 46th) with seared tamari glazed spam, egg, and seasoned rice wrapped in nori, served with the house gochujang spicy sauce. Better than a breakfast sandwich! But we’ve never actually cooked spam at home. Gotta put that on the to-do list.
“Spam is the ultimate loner food,” said the chef Esther Choi, who lives in a one-bedroom by herself in New York City. Working late hours to keep the lights on at all of her restaurants, Ms. Yoo and two Mŏkbar locations (with one more on the way), Choi doesn’t get to cook meals at home for herself very often. But when she does, she turns to the simple things: fried Spam, eggs, and Hetbahn, a single serving of Korean microwavable rice. “Even though I’m a chef and I can make anything in the world,” she said, “when I’m by myself, those are the things I want to eat.” —Eric Kim in The Lonely Legacy of Spam for Food52
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NYT Review of John Birdsall’s The Man Who Ate Too Much
A new biography traces the influence James Beard wielded as a writer and the pain he endured for his sexuality in an unwelcoming world.
For the first time, Mr. Birdsall brings both scholarly research and a queer lens to Beard’s life, braiding the strands of privilege and pain, performance and anxiety, into an entirely new story. Today, Beard’s definition of American cooking is complicated by questions about his authority, identity and privilege. Nevertheless, the book stands as a chronicle of the nation’s food for the arc of the 20th century. —Julia Moskin in A Deeper, Darker Look at James Beard, Food Oracle and Gay Man for The New York Times
Also by John Birdsall: America, Your Food is So Gay
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SPOTTED 👀
ONE MORE THING
December 22nd marks the 100th birthday of San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). Bet you didn’t know that he also wrote a regular column for the SF Examiner back in the 60s that also included some rather controversial thoughts on wine.
Here’s one of our favorite Rexroth poems:
It is the dark of the moon.
Late at night, the end of summer,
The autumn constellations
Glow in the arid heaven.
The air smells of cattle, hay,
And dust. In the old orchard
The pears are ripe. The trees
Have sprouted from old rootstocks
And the fruit is inedible.
As I pass them I hear something
Rustling and grunting and turn
My light into the branches.
Two raccoons with acrid pear
Juice and saliva drooling
From their mouths stare back at me,
Their eyes deep sponges of light.
They know me and do not run
Away. Coming up the road
Through the black oak shadows, I
See ahead of me, glinting
Everywhere from the dusty
Gravel, tiny points of cold
Blue light, like the sparkle of
Iron snow. I suspect what it is,
And kneel to see. Under each
Pebble and oak leaf is a
Spider, her eyes shining at
Me with my reflected light
Across immeasurable distance.
—Kenneth Rexroth, “Doubled Mirrors” from The Collected Shorter Poems
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That’s all for this week.
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–Bruce
p.s.
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"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end" –John Lennon