The Central Valley of California

The Central Valley is the long, flat basin that lies between the Coast Ranges and the Sierra Nevada, drained from the north by the Sacramento River and from the south by the San Joaquin, the two meeting in the delta before the water reaches San Francisco Bay. Its soils are alluvial, laid down over millennia by Sierra snowmelt, and its summers are long, hot and dry, so that the valley grows by irrigation what its climate would otherwise forbid. It is the principal fruit, nut and vegetable ground of the American table, and the cooking of California rests on it as the cooking of the Chesapeake rests on its water.

The valley's character as a food region is one of range rather than of a single dish. Within a few hours' drive a cook may pass orchards of almond (Prunus dulcis), walnut (Juglans regia) and pistachio (Pistacia vera), groves of olive (Olea europaea) and citrus, vineyards, rice fields, and the row crops that supply the nation's winter salads. The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) grown here goes largely to processing, and much of the canned and puréed tomato used in American kitchens begins in these fields. Stone fruit, among them peaches, plums and apricots, and the raisin and table grape, belong to the southern valley, where the heat concentrates sugar. Rice is the surprise of the northern valley. Flooded paddies around the Sacramento River grow short- and medium-grain japonica rice (Oryza sativa), a crop that suits the clay soils, which hold water, and the cool nights, and which came to the state through Asian farming communities and the demands of the market. The same flooded fields serve as winter habitat for migrating waterfowl, a link between the farm and the wild larder that older Californian cooking made use of. The people who worked the valley made its table as much as the soil did. Native peoples, among them the Yokuts and the Miwok, gathered acorns, seeds and fish here long before the orchards; the acorn, leached and ground to meal, was a staple. Later came farm labour from Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, China, Punjab and Portugal, and with it the habits of the taquería, the Basque and Portuguese table, and the Punjabi kitchen, which remain visible in the valley's towns. The cooking of the region is therefore the cooking of its harvest workers as well as of its growers. For the cook, the valley's lesson is one of season and proximity. The best of its produce is eaten near where it grew: the tree-ripened peach, the new-crop almond, the tomato cooked within a day or two of picking. Restraint follows from this, since fruit and vegetables of this quality ask for little more than salt, heat, good olive oil and acid, and the kitchens that draw on the valley most successfully are those that add least.

The taste of the valley is the taste of sun-ripened sugar and of oil: the dense sweetness of a dried fig or apricot, the buttery bitterness of a fresh walnut, the green pepper of new olive oil. Almonds and walnuts sit well against the acidity of tomato and citrus, and against the slight smokiness of grilled meat. The table that results is bright and fruit-led, built on freshness and on salt and acid used with a light hand.