Recipe taken from Encarnación's Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California itself a translation of Encarnación Pinedo’s, El cocinero español (San Francisco, 1898), the first Spanish language cookery text published in California. Pinedo presents her recipes as Spanish (despite the profusion of Mexican ingredients) and in the European tradition traced from Apicius (whom she names) through classic French and Italian cuisine. This is the third Spanish language cookbook published in America and the first outside of the northeastern United States.

The chiles: Choose chiles that are fresh, wide, and smooth. Roast them over the stove or over good hot coals, turning them over on all sides so that they roast evenly.

As soon as they are done, wrap them up in a damp napkin and leave them wrapped for six to eight minutes. After they have set, skin them carefully, being careful not to tear them. Remove the crown and seed carefully.

Now stuff the chiles with picadillo, using a teaspoon.

The Picadillo: Grind in a mortar a good piece of sirloin from which you have carefully removed the nerves. Next, chop two onions, a cup of mushrooms, two apples, olives, chopped or whole. Place a frying pan on the fire with a scant tablespoon on lard. Fry four chopped garlic cloves in it. Put in the meat and let it fry a few minutes before adding the onion, mushrooms, apples, a cup of tomato juice, a half a cup of well-washed raisins, six unstuffed olives, chopped parsley, oregano, pepper, salt, and fresh butter. Let it cook over low flame for a quarter of an hour without stirring.

The rellenos: Take ten eggs, separate the whites from the yolks and beat with a fork or a wicker spoon but by no means with a beater. When the white are beaten to snowy peaks, add three tablespoons of flour and fold into the eggs. The yolks are not added until the moment the chiles are fried. The other way makes the batter very thin and the chiles don’t fry well. When the yolks are added to the whites, give them a half a turn, pouring them on the chiles, turning them in the batter, then putting them in the already hot lard.

Obviously this is a quintessentially Mexican/American dish and not in the Spanish culinary tradition, and it’s easy to dismiss her concerns as snobbery, but what she was saying, in a manner that now seems a bit archaic, was: This is a Cuisine, and a tradition that I’m cooking in. I may be using ingredients, like chiles, that seem strange back in the Old World (though they were enthusiastically taken up and adapted in India, Africa and the Far East) but my methods and scope are traditional. She was also trying to elevate this new California cuisine above the “Yankee” English cookery that she found insipid.