The 6th Floor Test Kitchen: Summer of Love Edition or, Take Another Little Piece of My Tart Now Baby

It's the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love and the San Francisco Public Library is celebrating it with exhibitions at the Main and Park Branch libraries. The Summer of Love and Haight exhibit in the Jewett Gallery in the lower level of the Main Library features materials from the San Francisco History Center including photographs, record albums, flyers, and newspapers. In keeping with the spirit, the 6th Floor Test Kitchen decided to take a look at the influence hippie culture had on San Francisco's food scene.

Since its very beginnings, San Francisco offered a diverse array of foods from the many ethnicities that settled here. With the hippies came a resurgence of natural foods and an early spirituality revolving around what people ate. At the same time, there was a distinct focus on youth culture, fun, and a belief in breaking the rules, even in the kitchen.

Natural foods and natural living was not a new thing to San Francisco. You can read about San Francisco's health food and vegetarian restaurants of the 1920s and 1930s in Sheila Himmel's guest blog post "To Your Health." But granola and organic foods are ideas that often get equated with hippies.

Cover of The Organic Morning Glory Message: A Magazine for Natural Living #7 (April 1971)
- unbound periodical, San Francisco History Center, SFPL

Along with this back-to-nature lifestyle came an earthy spirituality that incorporated itself into the very making of food.

"Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination running through you, with dough under hand, you are breadmaking itself, which is why breadmaking is so fulfilling and rewarding." (The Tassajara Bread Book (1970), Introduction.)

Of course, not all of the young people who flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district were looking for organic wheat germ and sprouts. Many gathered for a good time and the community of a younger generation determined to change the rules - and maybe get rid of some of them altogether.

Image of Family Farmacy (2801 California St.) from The Good Time Manual: 257 Places in the Bay Area Where People Under 30 Are Going (or Should Be Going) (1972). Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, SFPL.

"FAMILY FARMACY - We went in, found an unoccupied piece of Persian rug, grabbed a couple of fluffy lavender pillows, and stretched out in front of a two foot high table made from a wooden telephone cable spool. In the middle was a five gallon Alhambra water jug turned upside-down holding a bunch of willow wisps, and surrounding the bottle were a few copies of Zap Comics, the I Ching, and a Whole Earth Catalogue. [...] Before we had a chance to scope out the décor any further, a braless waitress in a Wallace Beery tank top came over and put two other people at our table. One had on a Cossack coat, a pair of dungarees, an Apache headband, and a "Donald Duck is Jewish" T-shirt, and as he was making himself comfortable, he said, "Hi, I'm Tweetledum and this my girl friend, Tweedledee." Naturally we tried to find out what the cat was smoking, because it must have been good." (The Good Time Manual: 257 Places in the Bay Area Where People Under 30 Are Going (or Should Be Going), pp. 83-84)

Cover of A Guide to the Complete Enjoyment of Pot or, Moments of Pleasure with Cannabis Sativa [1966]. It includes recipes for dishes such as "Pot Loaf", "Hungarian Potlash", "Boston Bean Pot", and something called an "Apple Turn-On". Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, SFPL.

"It is a new day. Pot is good."

"Pot also increases the appetite and the user will find a new joy in a "Baby Ruth" or a "Mr. Goodbar". Hot fudge sundaes are a special treat at these moments, but as in the selection of music, the individual should let his own particular tastes be his guide." (A Guide to the Complete Enjoyment of Pot or, Moments of Pleasure with Cannabis Sativa, p. 10)

For our Test Kitchen we came across a recipe for "Haight-Ashbury Granola Cookies" in the Ghiradelli Original Chocolate Cookbook (1977). Ten years after the Summer of Love, these cookies still seem to hit upon the hippie ideal: natural foods, baked with love, for sharing among friends. It's up to you if you want to break a rule or two with that last book!

Cookies for the true sharing economy!

For more about the Summer of Love visit the exhibits at the Park Branch and at the Main. The exhibit Summer of Love and Haight will be in the Jewett Gallery, Lower Level of the Main Library, through October 29, 2017. The San Francisco History Center holds numerous materials on hippies including the Hippies Collection (SFH 60), books, newsclippings, and photographs.

For more about food in San Francisco, the San Francisco History Center holds a collection of cookbooks, ephemera files from San Francisco restaurants, and menus from San Francisco and beyond.

Menu from the Trident restaurant (558 Bridgeway, Sausalito, CA) [197-]