Review: Coastal Is a Culinary Love Letter to California's Central Coast

The cookbook offers everyday inspiration to get creative and elevate the ordinary.

Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip is a lavishly illustrated how-to manual for making ghee, lox tacos, rhubarb brownies, grilled eggplant yakitori, bacon-fat roasted turnips, and much more. It's also a love letter to California's central coast. Author Scott Clark is a college dropout who cooked at multiple hoity-toity restaurants before opening his own place—Dad's Luncheonette—in a rented caboose on California's Pacific Coast Highway.

A mix of classic American comfort food and crunchy-Californian dishes with multicultural flair, Coastal borrows ample inspiration and ingredients from Mexican, Japanese, French, Korean, and other cuisines. He gives fresh takes on familiar foods—red miso caramel apples, matcha mochi waffles—along with more adventurous fare (head cheese with charred onion mustard, anyone?).

These recipes are "project cooking"—unlikely to be your go-to weeknight meals. Still, Coastal offers everyday inspiration to get creative and elevate the ordinary.

A "visual storybook of free-spirited California living," Coastal introduces readers to not just recipes but the folks who make them possible, including sea vegetable foragers, wild boar hunters, regenerative farmers, and organic winemakers. It's a cookbook, but it's also a reminder of what makes America great: its melting pot of cultures, its natural beauty and abundance, its capacity to accommodate reinvention, and, of course, some perfectly crunchy potato chips.

Comments

[Chumby]

Any chance there is a recipe for a Cuban sammich in there?

[AT]

but it's also a reminder of what makes America great: its melting pot of cultures

It's interesting that you would use food to make this point. Let's talk about that for a minute.

Suppose we have a variety of ingredients. Chicken, carrot, celery, onion, parsnip, leeks, noodles, salt, pepper, bay, clove. All very different, all coming from very different places, some similar to others, others as foreign to each other as it gets.

Don't get me wrong, a chicken breast or thigh is delicious; everybody loves a carrot, the salt of the earth is always needed in good cooking. But when you stir them all together into the same pot, a melting pot, if you will; after they've *AHEM* assimilated, if you will; you get something that is MORE than the sum of its parts.

In this case, you get warm, comforting, delicious chicken soup. THAT'S what makes America great - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

But here's the thing about a melting pot - if you dump something in it that has no place being there, you'll ruin the whole damn thing.

America is indeed a melting pot of cultures. But the key distinction is that we (used to) exercise judgment, discretion, and even a little discrimination in order to make sure the melting pot stays delicious. If you throw some smelly old third world boot into the pot, you will render the soup disgusting and inedible.

Now, lest you say, "That's not a fair characterization of the third world, plenty of delicious things come from faraway lands," or "The first world has plenty of smelly old boots too," - you're absolutely right. But that's where the cultural discernment comes into play.

We are a melting pot of cultures. But if we do not discriminate between the best parts of those cultures, and outright reject that parts that aren't great - then we're just ruining what's in that pot.

So, to the Muslims, I say bring your hummus and falafel - but leave your wife-beating and Islamic nonsense back in your dumpster society. To the Indians, I say bring your butter and tandoori, but leave your caste system back in your dumpster society. Haiti, I welcome your griot and joumou - but if you even look at a housepet with hungry eyes, then we're sending you right back to your dumpster society.

Take the good, leave the garbage. That's the ONLY way any multicultural society will ever work. And if you can't tell the difference between good and garbage - you definitely shouldn't be anywhere near our melting pot.

[Nelson]

“ Take the good, leave the garbage. That's the ONLY way any multicultural society will ever work”

Agreed, 100%. You just seem to miss that angry, xenophobic bigots are the garbage. I wonder why that is?

[AT]

I agree completely that the American Left, those angry (and violent) xenophobic bigots, no longer have any business contributing to nor taking from our melting pot. They are the garbage. When they openly hate literally every aspect of American culture and American tradition and American values and American faith and American law and American nationalism - and make no effort whatsoever to hide it - they have no place being here. Even if they were born and raised here, their only contribution to the melting pot is to render it disgusting and inedible.

They are America's version of the smelly boot ruining the soup.