California Food & Traditional Cuisine

California's cooking reflects the state's people -- Indigenous, European American, Mexican and Latin American, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean -- and its geography: a Mediterranean climate, a coast that supplies the seafood staple, the Central Valley that grows more than half the country's fruits, vegetables and nuts, and a wine country next door. Restaurants, cafés, bistros and grills across the state source from local growers and farmers' markets as a matter of course, which is the habit the rest of the world later named farm-to-table.

Mexican and Spanish cooking is the most influential single strand, especially in the south: taquería food -- burritos, tacos, tortas, nachos, quesadillas -- is everyday food everywhere, and the traditional kitchen of tamales, mole, menudo and pozole lives in the border communities of San Diego, greater Los Angeles and the Bay. San Francisco added sourdough, whose starter bacterium is named for the city, and cioppino, the Genoese immigrants' fish stew. And the state that gave the world the fast-food chain still eats it: A&W, McDonald's, Taco Bell and Panda Express were all born here.

Mission burrito

The San Francisco burrito, popularised in the Mission District in the 1960s: distinguished by its size and by the rice inside, built in a steamed flour tortilla.

Fish taco

Grilled or fried fish with cabbage, pico de gallo and a citrus or sour-cream sauce on a tortilla, from Baja California, popularised north of the border by a San Diego chain and still most at home there.

Sourdough

San Francisco's white bread with its pronounced sourness, associated with the 1849 prospectors -- who more likely used yeast or baking soda -- and made by a starter whose bacterium is named sanfranciscensis.

Cioppino

The Italian-American seafood stew invented in San Francisco by immigrants from Genoa in the late 1800s: crab, shrimp, clams and firm fish in olive oil, wine, tomato and herbs.

The taquería plate

Tacos, burritos, tortas and quesadillas from a counter or a truck, in every town in the state; the traditional kitchen -- tamales, mole, menudo, pozole -- in the Mexican-American communities of the south and the Bay.

Acorns and the first cuisine

The staple of the native peoples, dried, shelled and ground into meal, still prepared in the tribal communities and the reason the oaks were sacred.

Farmers' markets are where California cooking starts: the encyclopaedia's own description of the state's restaurants is that they source from local growers and farmers' markets, and the Central Valley's produce, the coast's fish and the foothills' fruit meet the cities at them every week of the year. Sacramento repainted its water tower America's Farm-to-Fork Capital in 2017 and, after a petition, kept City of Trees beside it.

The taquería is the everyday restaurant, from the trucks of Los Angeles to the counters of the Mission; Chinatown in San Francisco and the Asian neighbourhoods of the Bay and the San Gabriel Valley carry the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese kitchens; the wharf at San Francisco is where cioppino and sourdough meet the Dungeness crab.

The drive-in and the chain are Californian inventions too, and the state's fast food is a culture rather than an apology.

California makes about ninety per cent of American wine and is the fourth-largest producer among the world's nations, with more than 4,200 wineries and close to 6,000 vineyards and growers. The vines came with the missions: Junípero Serra planted the state's first vineyard at Mission San Juan Capistrano in the 1770s, the gold rush brought the drinkers, and Agoston Haraszthy founded the first commercial winery, Buena Vista, at Sonoma in 1857, with Napa's first following in 1859. Phylloxera and Prohibition set the industry back to sweet, port-style and jug wine, and then the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 -- when French judges in a blind tasting ranked Californian Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon above the premier French labels, Napa's Chateau Montelena and Stag's Leap Wine Cellars among the winners -- put the state in the first rank of wine regions.

The map is Napa and Sonoma north of the bay, the North Coast around them, the Central Coast from the Bay to Santa Barbara, and the Central Valley, which grows nearly three-quarters of the state's wine grapes for the bulk, box and jug producers -- Gallo, Franzia and the rest. The visitor's wine country is the first two, an hour north of San Francisco; the value is often on the Central Coast.