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Recipes pages
Here, we present a collection of recipes from the former Timos San Francisco restaurant and from other restaurants and chefs whose names a lot of you will recognize. It is not a big collection, but it's very unlikely that you find any of these anywhere else. Enjoy!
NOTE: The recipes will not be translated; they will be shown as submitted by their authors - and that could be in any language.
A word about recipes
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (at least my copy) contains this definition:
"Om-elet or om-elette . n .: beaten eggs cooked without stirring until set and served folded in half". The author of this definition needs to read these pages. But that's another story.
In Italy, the item is called "frittata", in France "omelette", in Spain and Latin America (except in Mexico) "tortilla". It all means the same: beaten eggs cooked until set. You may drop it on the floor and never serve it - it still qualifies for its name.
I have eaten all the way from Madrid to Barcelona for weeks at a time; if there is a tapas bar in the entire region not serving "tortilla de patatas (potatoes)", it was either closed or out of business. And millions of these tortillas are made daily in Spanish homes for one of their five or six meals. Outside of Spain, this dish is usually called "tortilla española" for the same reason football is called "American football" outside of the U.S.
Being so simple that even those of us with Hispanic blood can prepare it - and so popular around the San Francisco area that the food critics have actually rated it - the recipe is a perfect model for the subject discussed here.
But before you do your recipe search and start breaking the eggs, please read the following comments:
When I was a kid, we always had a live-in woman cook (as did everybody else in the lower middle or higher classes). Most of the cooks and housekeepers were country kids whose families could not afford to support them, so they ended up in "la capital" in search of a better life - i.e. not starving to death. A recipe on paper they could use would have had to be in a format similar to this:
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… and you might have to explain the meaning of the railroad tracks and the fact that the crosses do not mean people are buried there.
And the food they put on the table was as good as anything we get today - or better.
What's the point?
Recipes are much like a music score. Just being able to read a recipe does not mean you are going to come up with a great dish - just like the ability to read notes without knowing something about music does not make someone a musician. There is a lot more to cuisine than just recipes.