Sometimes You Feel Like a Nutburger

Nut Kettle advertisement, October 1937, Playgoer for “Miss Quis” at the Mayan Theatre. Library of Congress, Music Division, Federal Theatre Project Collection

Today when we hear about nutburgers we typically assume it's a vegetarian patty that features nuts in its mixture, but when nutburgers were introduced in Southern California in the 1930s they were something completely different. They were beef hamburgers topped with chopped nuts and served on a toasted bun.

During the 1930s and 1940s, newspaper columnists that covered Hollywood reported on the celebrities who went in big for the nutburger including George Raft, Clark Gable, Groucho Marx, Mary Pickford, and James Cagney. Advertisements at the time called nutburgers “Hollywood’s Most Famous Sandwich.” Notable Hollywood novels, including Aldous Huxley’s Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, mention the nutburger and/or the nutburger stand. This indicates the trendiness of nutburgers at the time, but also perhaps the eccentricity of Hollywood to outside observers.

Gates Nut Kettle, which was on Sunset Blvd near Doheny, was the popular purveyor of nutburgers. According to a 1935 Los Angeles Times article about (what we now call) the Sunset Strip, Frank W. Gates opened the Nut Kettle in 1928. He later added a Palm Springs location. When he passed away in 1937, his oldest son Frank Jr. was in charge of the Los Angeles location, while his son John ran Palm Springs. Thankfully at least one customer swiped a menu from the Los Angeles location and wrote down the ingredients on a Nut Kettle nutburger. The hamburger was thin, the lettuce was shredded fine, the mayonnaise was spread easy, the mustard was spread easy, the relish was “fine pickle,” and the nuts were chopped fine.

Menu from The Nut Kettle with inset of menu contents and handwritten note with nutburger ingredients (circa 1937). Tiffney Sanford Collection.

But what type of nuts were used? While I wasn’t able to find a reference to the kinds of nuts used at the Nut Kettle, recipes in newspapers and cookbooks that I found were varied– peanuts, walnuts, or pecans were used to top a hamburger patty. I wanted to make the Nut Kettle nutburger at home and decided to use peanuts. One burger was made just as handwritten on the menu (with separate ingredients) and one burger was made with the toppings combined (which was described in a 1940 fan magazine). The burger with separate ingredients definitely won out. You could actually taste each addition, whereas the burger with the ingredients combined was not as memorable. In addition to the original, the Nut Kettle also sold the nutburger with cheese, and with cheese, tomato, and bacon.

Hankering for a more contemporary nutburger? Your Los Angeles Public Library card gives you access to the Los Angeles Times archive where I found the August 15, 1991 Culinary SOS column, written by Rose Dosti, that offered a recipe for a nutburger from the Follow Your Heart restaurant. Their vegetable and bulgur burger features raw almonds, raw cashews, and raw walnuts, as well as sunflower seeds. I haven’t tried it yet but I am still thinking about that Nut Kettle nutburger….

Found in the Stacks of the Los Angeles Public Library: Salute to the Salad Maker

A salad maker and customer at Boos Bros. cafeteria from Glancing Back Along the Cafeteria Trail (1926) Los Angeles Public Library Special Collections

Salads are my go-to meal when the days heat up and I was curious about their place in the culinary history of Los Angeles. What types of salads were Angelenos making and eating in the early 20th century? I went searching in the Los Angeles Public Library’s collections and resources for salads and salad making in Los Angeles and found quite a few interesting things.

First, I perused two of the library’s oldest Los Angeles-based cookbooks, Los Angeles Cookery (1881) and How We Cook in Los Angeles (1894). Both were written as church fundraisers and feature recipes supplied by prominent local women. Curiously, salad recipes in Los Angeles Cookery were found in the chapter on Sauces. Homemade mayonnaise was the most popular “sauce” for salads. The book had seven mayonnaise recipes in the short chapter, each with various additions such as sugar, mustard or cayenne. Chicken salad was the most popular salad– represented by multiple recipes– followed by potato salad and cabbage salad. Salads were treated to their own chapter in How We Cook in Los Angeles. Here French dressing joined the mayonnaise recipes, and salads include fruit and vegetable salads as well as a number of seafood salads, all of which highlight their specific ingredient.

While searching in historical local newspapers I was intrigued to read about the “salad makers” themselves. [It was even an occupation designation on the census!] Los Angeles city directories listed the professionals with the designation ‘salad mkr’. Many of those listed worked at cafeterias and tea rooms. According to these early twentieth century newspapers, the qualities that made an excellent salad maker included the ability to mix complementary ingredients in a specific order, and the successful blending of mayonnaise sauces. Salad maker tips included their preference for tearing lettuce leaves instead of cutting them, the encouragement to use wooden implements, and the practical advice of adding bell peppers and cucumbers on the side of the plate as garnish so they could be picked off the salad if desired.

The library’s menu collection, some of which is digitized and available on their website, is another great way to learn what types of salads Angelenos were eating. For example, a few of the salads listed on a seventy-year-old Musso & Frank menu in the library’s holdings can still be ordered at the restaurant today, including the Avocado Salad, Chiffonade Salad and Musso-Frank Special. Meanwhile, a Smoke House menu from a similar era shows how their salad options have grown considerably. In the 1950s you could order a chef’s salad or fruit salad, while today you can also get a beet & quinoa salad, or their barbecued chicken salad. You can even order Hollywood's legendary Cobb salad at the Smoke House restaurant in Burbank, or you can try making a variation of the original at home. A recipe for Robert Cobb’s salad can be found in The Brown Derby Cookbook (1949) available at the Central Library. It is interesting to note that the recipe’s salad greens included iceberg, romaine, watercress and chicory. Many of the Brown Derby recipes feature their French dressing, which according to the cookbook was bottled and sold to the public. I gotta say, their French dressing recipe was easier to perfect than the mayonnaise recipes we tried!

Found in the Stacks of the Los Angeles Public Library: Victory Vittles (1941-1945)

Do you enjoy perusing cookbooks for new-to-you tasty recipes? I often get lost in the aisles for quite a long time browsing the culinary collection at the Central Library. With food prices on the rise I thought back to stories my grandmother would tell of ration books, shortages of sugar and meat, and her dislike of butter substitutes. Butter substitutes aside, maybe World War II era cookbooks could offer up some tips for stretching a food budget.

The library has a large selection of cookbooks from 1941-1945 to choose from. Some are only available for use at the library but it was very easy to ask at the Science and Technology reference desk on Lower Level 2/LL2 for them to be pulled. [And don’t forget, the cookbooks you see on the shelves are just a fraction of the cookbooks available, there are even more in the library’s closed stacks that can be pulled upon request.] Many of the cookbooks I looked at gave recipes featuring foodstuffs unaffected by rationing, substitutes for sugar, tips on what to pack in a factory worker’s lunch, and information on growing your own food in a victory garden. Reading the recipes was fascinating, especially the ingredient pairings and recipe formats. Although some dishes such as Peanut Butter Loaf, which included lima beans and cooked carrots mixed with breadcrumbs, were best left as reference only. And yes–whether you call it dried beef, chipped beef, or frizzled beef– many of the cookbooks include variations on the popular SOS dish. There are also numerous World War II era cookbooks available to check out. I was pleasantly surprised by one particular book published in Hollywood in 1943 titled Coupon Cookery, A Guide to Good Meals Under Wartime Conditions of Rationing and Food Shortages by Prudence Penny. In addition to food substitution information, there were several pages of money-saving tips (e.g. how to jazz up leftovers, root-to-stem cooking), fun illustrations, and regionally-named recipes such as Los Angeles Pot Pie and Balboa Summer Salad. Prudence Penny, the pseudonym used by food column/home economics writers in Hearst newspapers nationwide, was in this case (according to local newspaper accounts) Lucile Martens who wrote for the Los Angeles Examiner from 1941-1944. Another former Examiner Prudence Penny, Pauline Saylor Patterson (aka Polly Patterson), had a radio show on KFAC. In 1942 she put the call out to her listeners to share their own recipes of “foods for defense.” The recipes were gathered and published as Victory Vittles. Visit the library to learn more about those vittles.

The library offers books that explain the hows and whys and ins and outs of rationing. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America by Harvey Levenstein offers a great overview on the food shortages, nutritional values, and government agencies that affected cookery during World War II. But whatever you do, don’t miss M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf (1942). Ms. Fisher described what it was like to set food on the table during World War II, and in a revised edition in the 1950s, reflected on her original book in retrospect. There was something to take away from each of the books I looked through, and more than one something to leave right where it was….

Photo captions- Photo 1: Lunch for the factory worker from Wartime Canning and Cooking Book by Josephine Gibson Photo 2: Illustration from Coupon Cookery (1943)

Found in the Stacks of the Los Angeles Public LIbrary: Chef Wyman (1927)

Trusted Southern California culinary arts experts of the 1930s and 40s, such as the pseudonymous Marian Manners of the Los Angeles Times and Prudence Penny of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, owed a debt of thanks to Chef A.L. Wyman for locally demonstrating and popularizing the economical preparation of food in the home. While the household tips and recipes of Marian Manners and Prudence Penny are still referenced today, Chef Wyman remains largely forgotten.

Born in Sacramento in 1875, Arthur Leslie Wyman represented Globe Grain and Milling Company (known for Globe A-1 flour) and Southern California Edison in cooking demonstrations across Southern California beginning in the 1910s. The press touted him as “a culinary artist of international fame,” possessing a Master of Culinary Arts degree plus experience at large bake shops and hotel kitchens around the world including the Waldorf Astoria (New York), Rector’s (New York and Chicago), Alexander Young Hotel (Honolulu) and Shepheard’s (Cairo).

During World War I, in addition to teaching housewives how to use their new electric stoves, Chef Wyman lectured on “war economy cooking” and food conservation. This included tips on cooking with food scraps; canning fruits and vegetables; finding substitutes for wheat, flour and butter; conserving sugar; and introducing meatless dishes (using walnuts, beans or peas as meat substitutes) to your family. Interested in how to bake “war bread” by combining potatoes with barley or oats? Chef Wyman, along with his wife and cooking assistant Mabelle, taught you how.

Beginning in 1922, Chef Wyman parlayed his fame into a weekly column in the Los Angeles Times titled “Practical Recipes: Helps [sic] for Epicures and All Who Appreciate Good Cooking.” Readers were invited to submit questions and recipe requests to Chef Wyman’s Glendale test kitchen that he would answer in the column. Requests poured in from residents and tourists alike and the column featured 12-16 recipes each week. In addition to requests for specific recipes, Chef Wyman tackled topics such as growing and drying your own herbs, cooking with locally caught fish, and making jelly and preserves with locally available fruit (one example used the fruit of the Spanish Bayonet). His recipes, written out as an instructional paragraph, proved popular and readers often asked where they could buy his cookbook. After explaining he did not have a cookbook to sell, he urged readers to cut his recipes out of the newspaper and file them away.

Sadly, Chef Wyman passed away in October 1926. His wife Mabelle took over duties on the Practical Recipes column in the Times and finally published a cookbook of the late chef’s recipes. The cookbook features recipes using California fruits and vegetables, including dishes he created and named after the towns of his readers– Sunland Salad, Eggs Riverside, Eggs Shirred Willowbrook, Hollywood Salmon, Pomona Salad, Gardena Sandwich and Los Angeles parfait. Check it out for yourself, Chef Wyman’s Daily Health Menus (1927) is available at the Los Angeles Public Library.

Curious about the history of culinary coverage in the Los Angeles Times? The library has past Culinary Historian of Southern California lectures available to borrow on CD, including “Food and the Times: A Century of California Cuisine as Recorded by the Los Angeles Times” and “The L.A. Times Food Section Gals.”

Happy New Year Los Angeles 1911!!

An option for celebrating the New Year in 1911 would have been dinner at Casa Verdugo. Hop on the Pacific Electric Railway and be dropped practically at their door. Ads of the day described Casa Verdugo with the words: convenient, appetizing, service, attractive, vintage, elegance, refined, dainty, ultra, gratifying and original. The first letter of each of these words spells out your destination: Casa Verdugo. For an excellent and informative lecture please check out Charles Perry's Culinary Historians of Southern California lecture on the history of Casa Verdugo.



Other New Year's ideas that year prove timeless - an ad asks that "When you dine tonight ask for California wine. Remember that a dollar spent for California wine means a dollar left in California, while a dollar spent for foreign wine goes out of the country."

When the dawn broke on the first day of the new year it was noted that 'Police Surgeons and Police Sergeants were disappointed in the numbers, respectively, of injured and intoxicated.' The celebrating crowds were larger than ever before, thousands of people thronged Spring, Broadway and Main Streets, but there were only twelve arrests made the whole night and all were for drunkenness. The population in Los Angeles proper was approximately 320,000 in 1910 and apparently the police were hoping for a little more excitement!!