In addition to its Hispanic and immigrant culinary heritages, California’s cuisine was influenced by foods, recipes, and traditions brought by Americans from the eastern United States. California’s first cookbooks were written mainly by Americans from the eastern states. The first cookbook published in California was B. F. Barton and Company’s Peerless Receipt Book, published around 1870. It was an advertising cookbooklet promoting Peerless Baking Powder. During the next few years, several California cookbooks were published, some as fund-raisers, including The Sacramento Ladies Kitchen Companion (1872), compiled for the benefit of Grace Church. After 1875, California cookbooks proliferated. Among the more interesting early cookbooks were Abby Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1881), which was the first California cookbook written by an African American. The second was El Cocinero Español (1898), the first Spanish-language cookbook printed in California. Its author, Encarnación Pinedo, came from a prominent California family, and her recipes represented sophisticated Mexican cooking in nineteenth-century California. She was not impressed with English cooking traditions, stating (as translated by Dan Strehl) that there was “not a single English cook who knows how to cook well, and the food and style of seasoning is the most insipid and tasteless as can be imagined.”
