Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

Clara Weidman Baker’s recipe box held a lot of wisdom in a small space. Her oatmeal cookies held the cloves. Warm and a little unexpected, like most good inheritances. Her recipe listed no baking time. She instinctively knew how long to cook things, the kind of knowledge that lived in her hands, not on the card.

Her version called for butter and lard mixed together, and sweet milk. Details that tell you exactly when and where a recipe was made.

These heritage cookies are chewy, satisfying, and last for weeks in the fridge. Ideal for a very good breakfast or a Tuesday afternoon.

Notes

1. This can all be done in today’s mixer, quicker, and slightly easier, though I chose to make it the way Clara would have with spoons, whisks, and bowls.

2. Sweet milk is an old-fashioned term for whole milk, used to distinguish it from buttermilk or sour milk. Clara would have written it exactly that way. Use whole milk.

3. Lard in Clara's day meant the real thing. I use Spectrum Naturals Organic Vegetable Shortening. It’s gluten-free, widely available at Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's, and on Amazon.

4. Yield depends on the size of your cookie. Small cookies yield about 3 dozen and can be baked in under 30 minutes if you have enough sheet pans to run multiple batches simultaneously. Larger cookies yield fewer.

5. I used two modern cookie scoops, testing each batch at 1 tablespoon and 2 tablespoons. The larger scoop made larger cookies, which also required longer cooking time. For larger cookies, I tested at 8 minutes then 12, but my oven needed 14 to 16 minutes. For smaller cookies, 12 minutes was right.

6. Oven temperatures vary and humidity affects baking. Use the visual cue, just golden at the edges, as your guide rather than the clock alone.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

Raspberries, fresh lemon juice, sugar, vanilla extract, sea salt. Five ingredients, less than an hour, and somehow the most refreshing thing you can make on a hot afternoon. No dairy, no gluten, lighter than ice cream, and made with fruit you already have in the freezer. Which, if you’re smart about it, you always do.

I keep frozen fruit stocked year-round. A bag of raspberries has gotten me out of more than one afternoon slump. Make a batch, store it for a month, or watch your family find it in twenty minutes and make another batch the next day. Either way, keep the freezer full.

This sorbet is part of a larger project. Last May, I made a whole collection of frozen things, part Helen Wissel Carnes, part Clara Weidman Baker, part me riffing on cocktail-driven versions of sorbet and ice cream alongside the ancestral recipes. This raspberry sorbet came out of that summer, out of a craving, and out of the fact that my mom and I cannot be in the same room as raspberries without eating them immediately. The full 2025 frozen collection is here.

Notes

1. A simple syrup, equal parts sugar and water, heated until dissolved and cooled, would make the sorbet smoother. I skipped it to keep things simple. Both versions work. Your call.

2. Pressing out the seeds can be tedious. They don’t bother me, and I don’t want to take the time. However, if you’d like it free of seeds you can add the raspberries and water to a food processor, pulse until smooth, then push the puree through a fine-mesh sieve into a large bowl, one cup or less at a time. Use the back of a large spoon or a spatula to press the mixture through and retain the seeds. Repeat until all puree has been pressed through then discard the seeds. Pour the seed-free puree back into the food processor then add the sugar, lemon juice, sea salt and vanilla extract and process until completely incorporated.

3. The Tovolo Glide-a-Scoop Ice Cream Container, 1.5 qt, is a dream for storing sorbets and ice creams. Slides out cleanly, no digging.

4. A Chinois Fine-Mesh Cone Sieve makes pushing seeds and fibers through a puree considerably less miserable. The cone format lets you press thick puree through without wearing out your arm or your patience.

5. Serve with a sprig of mint and a Raspberry Ricky. Raspberry, citrus, soda or seltzer, or boozy with tequila or gin, or not at all.

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257 Years is a series on the history of wine in Southern California. Part Two traced the Mission grape from Spain to San Diego in 1769. This is Part Three.

This week, we turn back to the Vine and step into a city that doesn’t think of itself as wine country anymore. But once was. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally. By the numbers. By the acres. By the gallons.

Last time, I traced a single grape from a sun-scorched plain in Spain to the soil of San Diego in 1769. This week, the story moves north. To Los Angeles. To downtown LA, specifically the streets you’ve driven past a hundred times without knowing what they used to be.

I’ve been pulling on this thread for weeks now. Every time I pull, something else comes loose. A vineyard in the courtyard of the oldest house in the county. A Frenchman who shipped Bordeaux cuttings around Cape Horn wrapped in damp moss. A sycamore tree, four hundred years old, marking the entrance to a hundred-acre vineyard, that lived through everything and was finally cut down in the 1890s. A disease without a name that killed twenty-five thousand acres of vines, while no one understood what it was. The Tongva people who built it all and were forbidden from drinking what they made.

This is the story of how Los Angeles became the wine capital of California. And how it stopped being one. It is also the story of who built it. Most of the names on the wineries are not the names of the people who did the work. That matters.

Let me show you what I found.

The Adobe on Olvera Street

The oldest building still standing in Los Angeles County is on Olvera Street, in the heart of downtown. It was built in 1818 by Francisco Avila, a Californio rancher whose father had settled in the pueblo of Los Angeles thirty-five years earlier. In the courtyard, Avila planted a vineyard.

The vine he planted is still alive. As recently as 2016, it was documented as the oldest Mission vine in California still yielding fruit.

This is where the story of Los Angeles wine actually begins. Not in 1833, when a Frenchman arrived with cuttings from Bordeaux. Fifteen years earlier, with a Mexican-born settler planting Mission grapes in a downtown courtyard.

The Avila family had been in Los Angeles since 1783, two years after the pueblo was founded. Cornelio Avila, a Spanish soldier, arrived from Sinaloa with his wife and six children. By the time Francisco built the adobe, the family was three generations deep into the city’s founding. His son Miguel would later serve as Alcalde of San Luis Obispo and receive the land grant for Rancho San Miguelito, which today includes Avila Beach.

The vineyard on Olvera Street wasn’t an outlier. Manuel Requena had eight acres of vines, a little south of Aliso Street, on the east side of Los Angeles Street, before 1831. Pinney calls him a “man of “a well-cultivated mind, and a high order of intelligence,” making prizewinning wines from his Los Angeles vineyard before any French winemaker had set foot in the pueblo.

The story most people know about LA wine starts with a Frenchman. The truer story starts earlier. With Californios.

The Mission Engine

To understand how those Californio vineyards came to be, we have to go back to Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.

Founded in 1771 by Father Junípero Serra, fourth in the chain of California’s twenty-one missions, San Gabriel sat in the foothills east of what would become Los Angeles. It was positioned at the crossroads of three important Indigenous trade routes. Within decades, it would become the largest and most productive wine producer in Alta California, known as the Pride of the Missions and more abundant than any of the other twenty.

The Mother Vine planted at San Gabriel in the 1770s is still alive. It is a hybrid: the Mission grape crossed with Vitis girdiana, the native wild grape of Southern California. A vine that exists nowhere else on earth. The 2020 fire that destroyed much of the mission’s roof did not kill it.

In 1786, cuttings from San Gabriel were brought to the Pueblo de Los Ángeles to establish the first plantings inside the city itself. By the time Francisco Avila built his adobe in 1818, the city had been growing Mission grapes for thirty-two years.

But none of this was built by missionaries alone.

The Tongva people, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin, were the labor force at San Gabriel. They planted the vines, pruned them, harvested the fruit, pressed the grapes, and made the wine. Julia Ornelas-Higdon, a historian at California State University Channel Islands who has spent five years researching the labor history of California wine, puts it plainly: “Wine was really a tool of conquest for the Spanish.”

The Tongva were prohibited from drinking the wine they made, outside of Catholic Mass. Ownership of winemaking tools was criminalized for Indigenous Californians. “California natives are the ones who planted, pruned, harvested the grapes, and did all of that work,” Ornelas-Higdon writes. “Yet the irony is that they had very limited access to the literal fruits of their labors.”

This is how the foundation of Los Angeles wine was laid. Not in a single founding moment. In sixty years of forced labor, conversion, and disease that decimated the Tongva population. The vineyards that the Californio families inherited after 1833 were not empty land. They were vineyards built by people whose names were not written down.

The Year Everything Shifted

Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821. In 1833, the Mexican government began secularizing the missions — taking the land from the Franciscans and redistributing it.

Mission vineyards passed into private hands. Ranchos became the new centers of wine production. Rancho Paso de Bartolo Viejo covered what is now Montebello, Whittier, and Pico Rivera. Henry “Don Enrique” Dalton’s Rancho Azusa stretched across present-day Azusa, Arcadia, Monrovia, Irwindale, and Baldwin Park. A Californio wine economy was emerging, grounded in the older traditions of the Avilas and Requena, now scaled to the ranchos.

Eighteen thirty-three was also the year Jean-Louis Vignes arrived.

The Frenchman and El Aliso

Jean-Louis Vignes was born in 1780 in Cadillac, a town in the Bordeaux wine country. He was a trained cooper. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1831, fifty-one years old, and within two years had acquired one hundred and four acres of land in the heart of the pueblo’s vineyard district.

Pinney maps the property precisely: it ran from Alameda Street on the west to the Los Angeles River on the east, and from Aliso Street south to First Street. One hundred and four acres, in what is now the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Today, Union Station sits inside what used to be his vineyard.

At the entrance to the property stood a giant sycamore tree. The Spanish word for sycamore is aliso. The tree gave the vineyard its name, “El Aliso,” and gave the street its name, too. Aliso Street is still on the map.

The tree was sixty feet high and twenty feet in circumference. When it finally died and was cut down in the 1890s, it was estimated to be four hundred years old. It had been standing when the Tongva villages were the only settlements in the basin. It witnessed the Spanish arrival, the building of Mission San Gabriel, the founding of the pueblo, the Mexican period, the rise of LA wine, and the beginning of its end.

Vignes planted the Mission grape on most of his acreage. But in 1833, he did something none of the Californio winemakers had done: he imported European Vitis vinifera cuttings from his native Bordeaux. Cabernet Franc. Sauvignon Blanc. He had the cuttings wrapped in damp moss and slices of potato to survive the journey around Cape Horn.

This is the moment most histories of California wine choose as their starting point. It’s not wrong, exactly. Vignes did bring the first non-Mission European varieties to California. The quality of the wine produced in Los Angeles changed because of him. He became one of the wealthiest men in the pueblo, known as Don Luis del Aliso.

But Vignes did not found Los Angeles wine. He arrived inside it. The Californios had been growing grapes for decades. The Tongva had been doing the labor for sixty years. Vignes raised the ceiling. He didn’t lay the foundation.

The City of Vines

By the mid-1850s, Los Angeles had a nickname: the City of Vines. It was not a marketing slogan. It was a description.

In 1857, California produced 385,000 gallons of wine. Of those, 350,000 gallons came from Los Angeles. That’s 91 percent. The county nearest to LA in scale was Santa Clara, with 150,000 vines. Los Angeles County had over a million.

Sonoma, Pinney notes, was just beginning to be heard from. Napa, hardly at all yet.

This was not a small wine region. This was the engine of California wine.

The figures of the era are worth naming. William Wolfskill, born in Kentucky, came to Los Angeles as a trapper and became the largest vineyard owner in the city. He would later expand into Yolo and Solano counties. Pierre Sainsevain, Vignes’s nephew, took over El Aliso and in 1855 became the first commercial sparkling wine producer in California. Charles Kohler and John Frohling, German immigrants, built Kohler & Frohling into one of the largest wine companies of the era. Frohling was also one of the founders of Anaheim, which was established in 1857 as a German-American wine colony. At its peak, the Anaheim Colony had over a million vines planted.

Matthew Keller, the kind of figure every era produces, claimed in his statistics that Los Angeles County had a million and a half bearing vines and another eight hundred and seventy-five thousand not yet productive, with plans for a million more cuttings the next season. Pinney notes drily that Keller’s numbers were “no doubt inflated.” But even with the inflation removed, the picture is the same. LA County was the dominant wine producer in California by a margin that’s almost difficult to believe today.

The transcontinental railroad arrived in 1876. Bulk wine could now be shipped to East Coast markets in refrigerated rail cars, bypassing the slow and expensive sea route around Cape Horn. The industry boomed.

The Hands That Built It

The boom did not happen because of the men whose names are on the wineries. It happened because of the workers whose names are not.

Ornelas-Higdon’s research is unsparing on this point. “If we peel back the layers of this history,” she writes, “we see this amazing, diverse industry that was really working class, that was immigrant, and that included a lot of populations of color.”

The labor force of Los Angeles wine in the second half of the nineteenth century included Indigenous Californians — Tongva, Chumash, and others displaced from the missions, often returning as wage laborers to vineyards their ancestors had built. It included Mexican Californios, both as landowners and as workers. In the 1860s and 1870s, vineyard owners began recruiting Mexican and Yoemi — Yaqui laborers from the Arizona-Sonora borderlands.

But the most sought-after workforce of the era was Chinese immigrant laborers. They cleared the land. They planted the vines. They pruned and harvested. They dug the wine caves by hand.

Ornelas-Higdon documents the reasons: “They were stereotyped as being compliant and docile, which made them desirable. Also, vineyard owners could get away with paying them less money and putting them up in substandard housing for much less than what they would pay white workers.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 cut off the immigration that had built much of Los Angeles wine. By then, much of the work was done. The vineyards bore the names of the men who owned them. Not the names of the people who built them.

This is the history that gets edited out when California wine tells the story of itself. It is the history that has to be written back in.

The Mysterious Disease

In 1884, vines in the Santa Ana Valley began to show strange signs. Leaves browned at the edges. Fruit failed to ripen. Vines died slowly through the growing season rather than all at once.

In 1885, the disaster broke open. Whole vineyards in Anaheim turned to dead wood. Within a year, it was everywhere.

Growers gave the disease different names as they tried to understand it. The Mysterious Disease. The New Disease. The Los Angeles Rot. The California Disease. The Anaheim Disease. None of the names helped. The vines kept dying.

By the end of the decade, winegrowing in and around Anaheim was finished. Pinney documents twenty-five thousand acres of vineyard dead across Anaheim, the San Gabriel Valley, and San Bernardino County. The German colony’s million-plus vines were largely gone.

In 1891, the United States Department of Agriculture sent a pathologist, Newton B. Pierce, to investigate. His findings, published in 1892, identified a microorganism that had begun spreading in the Santa Ana Valley around 1884. Seven years before the federal government took it seriously. The disease that bears his name today, Pierce’s disease, is now understood as a bacterial infection carried by sharpshooter insects.

In 1885, no one knew that. They only knew their vineyards were dying.

Several things were happening at once. The disease was one. Real estate was another. Los Angeles was growing fast, and land that had been vineyards became more valuable as building lots than as farmland. The citrus industry was rising. Oranges proved more profitable than wine grapes. Northern California, less affected by Pierce’s disease and benefiting from cooler nights, expanded rapidly. By 1890, Sonoma and Napa together outproduced Southern California by a five-to-one ratio.

The Sainsevain brothers, Pierre and Jean-Louis, closed El Aliso and moved east, into the Cucamonga Valley. They were not the only ones. The surviving Los Angeles winemakers pushed east, into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, looking for land that hadn’t yet been infected, urbanized, or sold to developers.

That story, What happened in Cucamonga, is the next installment.

What Remains

Walk through downtown Los Angeles today, and you can still find the bones.

Vignes Street still bears his name. Aliso Street still marks where the great sycamore stood. The Avila Adobe is still on Olvera Street. The vine in its courtyard is still alive. Michael Holland, a Los Angeles city archivist, makes small-batch wine from those vines.

The Ramona Vine still grows at Mission San Gabriel. Believed to be 249 years old, planted before the United States was a nation. It has grown as large as a tree, sprawling across the mission grounds. It is, by the Los Angeles Vintners Association's reckoning, the oldest tended grapevine in the United States. After the 2020 fire, the association harvested its grapes and made Angelica, the sweet, fortified wine that takes its name from Los Angeles itself, and that historians consider the first true California wine. They followed the padres' old method: fresh-crushed Mission grape juice, fortified with brandy before it could ferment, aged at least three years in barrel. One of the winemakers said it tasted like cherry cordial. A flavor profile unique in the world. It is, for now, sold out. I’m on the waitlist. So is everyone else.

The group that did that work, the Los Angeles Vintners Association, was founded in 2019 by Mark Blatty of Byron Blatty Wines, joined by Jasper Dickson and Amy Luftig Viste of Angeleno Wine Company, Patrick Kelley of Cavaletti Vineyards, and Ben and Katy Sposato of Acri Wine Company. They are working with growers across Southern California, from Agua Dulce to the Antelope Valley to Dulzura on the Mexican border, to revive the city’s lost winemaking tradition.

Other producers are scattered across the county. Charles Wine Co. in Santa Clarita’s Sierra Pelona Valley. Reyes Winery on fourteen acres in the same valley. Mighty Yee Wines, made by Linda Yee on annual trips to Sonoma. The work is small. The wines are real.

Los Angeles will probably never again be the wine capital of California. The land is gone, paved over, built up, far too valuable now for vines. But what was here was not erased. It was buried. And the people working today to bring it back, to plant new vines, to harvest the surviving old ones, to make wine that honors what came before, are doing something that matters.

The story told most often about California wine starts with a Frenchman named Vignes. The truer story starts earlier. With a vineyard in a downtown courtyard. With the Tongva who planted at San Gabriel. With a Californio named Manuel Requena. With a sycamore tree that watched it all and lived for four hundred years.

The City of Vines is gone. But the bones are still here.

The Ledger Entry

If your family came to California for the land, to farm, to plant, to harvest, to build something out of the ground, I’d love to hear about it. The vines, the orchards, the fields. The work that doesn’t always make it into the history books.

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257 Years is a series on the history of wine in Southern California.

Part One introduced the family thread that started it all. Part Two traced the Mission grape from Spain to San Diego in 1769. This is Part Three.

Part Four: What the Freeway Buried is coming this summer about the Cucamonga Valley, Secondo Guasti’s empire, and the families that held on.

From the series:

• Part One → 257 Years: How Southern California Lost and Found Its Wine

• Part Two → Before Napa, There Was a Boat Leaving Spain

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about living — food, wine, memory, and whatever the day puts on the table. All essays are free at jenniferannblair.com.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

I walked to the back room.

How is it 2 pm and the bed is still unmade?

Folded shorts piled on my arm, shirts that need to be hung, rolled over the pants, quietly wrinkling directly out of the dryer. The room smells like attic air, the AC overhead doing its best, rose geranium lavender lotion, and essential oils from the laundry, and underneath all of it, Archie. He needs a bath. He won’t go near water voluntarily, which means I have to chase him around the yard with a hose. He loves every minute of it. I do not.

Some days seem simpler, slower. Today is not that day.

The sun is sinking in from the west at 100 degrees. Ah, the bed. Always undone. I drop the laundry on the bathroom counter, scoot over to pull the gray sheets that were once white up over the pillows, tuck them in, and tidy the blanket so it looks like an adult lives here, not a hot mess. Who’s going to see it anyway? Just me.

Back to the clothes. I should shower.

My scattered brain is all over the place. Studying for wine tests, trying to remember every winemaking tool, all the steps needed to establish a vineyard, how a particular machine works. Really, all I want to do is drink the wine. A glass of Endless Crush Rosé of Pinot Noir from Inman Family Wines, pale, ballet-pink, crisp acidity, ruby red grapefruit and honeysuckle and watermelon, while sitting in the vineyard. The rest of it is science. Important, yes, I suppose. But my creative brain prefers taste, feeling, aroma, connection, memory, ritual. The stories are so much more interesting than the machinery.

Anyway. Shower.

The people who lived here before me, lunatics, I say this with love, had issues with doors and windows and removed all of them, including the shower doors. Which is why there’s a curtain. Organic cotton, sapphire design, white and sage, five years old. I lean toward the shower, pull the curtain, drag it to the right to make room, and barely turn the water on, just a trickle warming up, when I JUMP.

Is that a tarantula?

OMG OMG OMG.

WAIT.

Is that Archie?

That is my dog. Curled up in the back corner of the shower, his paws the only thing visible from where I stood. Black, tan, white, and fluffy. The tile was cool. The skylight pours heat in during the afternoon, which is exactly why spiders love this shower, and apparently, so does a 90-pound German Shepherd who needed somewhere to think.

I stood there hyperventilating.

He was warm on his ears when he finally got up. The top of him quite warm. He stretched, one long, slow, unbothered stretch, then walked straight out of the back of the shower, across the tile in front of me, out of the bathroom, and directly onto the bed. The one I had just made.

He didn’t apologize.

I stood there, still panting, laughing out loud at nothing. That’s when the idea came. Make brownies. Dark and unsettling and surprisingly welcome, just like the thing I thought had taken up squatting in my shower for the afternoon.

Before You Go

What does your dog do that makes absolutely no sense and perfect sense at the same time?

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Next Time

A deep dive into the SoCal AVA, the wine region most people drive past without knowing it exists. Next week, I’m heading to Napa, Carmel, and San Luis Obispo. What I’m looking for, what I’m hoping to find, and what I’ll bring back to the table.

Come to the Table: The Reading Series

A reading series is launching in July: MFK Fisher’s Consider the Oyster, a dedicated chat, and a monthly discussion. Less newsletter, more gathering. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, a paid subscription is $80 a year.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about living. Food, wine, memory, and whatever the day puts on the table. All essays are free at jenniferannblair.com.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

In our family recipe box, among the well-worn cards and handwritten notes, I found a chocolate chip brownie recipe in my grandmother Clara Weidman Baker's handwriting. Even my mom, usually our family recipe detective, doesn’t remember it being made.

My first attempt followed the card exactly. I ended up with cookies. Delicious, but not brownies.

So I went back in. Brown sugar for density and chew. White sugar for the crackly top. Dutch-processed cocoa for depth. Dark chocolate chips folded in and scattered over the top. What came out the other side was rich, fudgy, and completely its own thing, still connected to the original card, just finally finished.

The card made cookies in her kitchen. It makes brownies in mine.

Notes

1. The crackly top is the sign they're done. Watch for it alongside the set edges. Don't pull them early. Dutch-processed cocoa is worth seeking out here. It delivers a deeper color and richer chocolate flavor than natural cocoa.

2. Serve with milk, coffee, or Portugal's Tawny Port if you're feeling serious about it.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

Come in. Sit down. There’s wine open, and something’s in the pantry. Whatever you’re in the mood for, we’ll find it.

That’s the feeling of this place. No agenda, no dress code, no expertise required. Just good company, something worth eating or drinking, and the kind of conversation that doesn’t wrap up neatly because it isn’t supposed to.

I’ve been thinking about MFK Fisher lately, the way she’d have Julia Child, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Ruth Reichl, a long list of merry chefs over, and they’d visit, cook something, drink, wander outside, sit, and talk until the light changed. Nobody was performing. Nobody was teaching. They were just people who loved food and wine and each other’s company, and that was enough.

That’s what I’m after here.

What this is

Writing about the table: what we pour, what we cook, what we inherit, and who we become when we finally sit down. Essays about living, with food and wine as the honest way in. California wine history that goes back further than most people think to look. Recipes that show up when the season calls for them, with the stories still attached.

Not a course. Not a brand. Just someone paying attention and writing it down.

Where to start

If you want to know what the writing sounds like, wander into the archive. The 257 Years series, tracing California wine from the Mission grape forward, is the longest thread. The recipe essays are shorter and arrive with something attached: a story, a season, a person who cooked this before I did.

If you want to know who I am, the About page has the longer version. The short version: I spent a long time in advertising telling other people’s stories, which was interesting until it wasn’t. Now I live in the desert with a German Shepherd named Archie who has opinions about everything and no concept of personal space.

What’s coming

More essays. More wine history. Recipes when the season calls for them. A reading series launching July 2026, first book: Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher. Paid subscribers get the drinks too. Wine pairings, cocktails, and mocktails with the stories behind them, plus the discussion and dedicated chat.

How it works

The writing is always free. Recipes are always free. Drinks show up free occasionally when they’re in service of the story.

The full drinks content, reading series, and dedicated chat are for paid subscribers. $8 a month or $60 a year.

Pull up a chair. There’s always room.

— Jennifer

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

Every year, without fail, the bell rings for my mother.

Not the dinner bell. Though that rings too. The birthday bell. The one that calls the whole family in, clears the calendar, and turns an ordinary weekend into something worth remembering. This year, it rang for her 84th, and we answered the way we always do. Loud, happy, and slightly over-catered.

She arrived at a phone already full of calls and texts. But honestly, the phone had been ringing all week. An event every single night, Monday through Sunday, friends and neighbors show up to celebrate her. By the time the family gathered for the weekend, she had already been thoroughly, joyfully celebrated. We were just the finale. My little sister celebrated up north in beautiful Carmel with her own family, but she and her crew called all week, for the birthday, for Mother’s Day, for all of it. Which is its own kind of showing up. By Friday night, the rest of us were at dinner, toasting her with something good in our glasses and something better in our hearts. Saturday was the pool, cocktails, presents, and Mexican Train running long into the evening, the way it always does when nobody wants the day to end. Sunday was brunch at home. Waffles, mimosas, bacon, sausage, berries, nuts, whipped cream, the jacuzzi, the pool, and the particular kind of slow happiness that only happens when everyone you love is in the same backyard.

The dogs had opinions about all of it. Max, the golden retriever, did what Max does. Dumped his entire self into the pool, then half-asleep in the shade like a lion who has decided he’s earned it. Roxy, the little shepherd mix, wanted absolutely nothing to do with the water, thank you very much, though she remained deeply devoted to Archie’s general vicinity. And Archie, true to his shepherd nature, spent the afternoon changing the water level from the edge of the pool without actually getting in. Supervision, not swimming. He has standards.

The Ritual

What we do every year, more or less.

A birthday in this family is never just a day. It’s a gathering. Not always this extravagant, sometimes it’s smaller, quieter, a dinner and a cake, and the right people around the table. But it’s always intentional. Always worth stopping for. That’s the ritual. Not the specific dishes or the specific games or the specific cocktails, but the decision to show up for each other and make it matter. Even from Carmel.

This year, thanks to a recommendation from a live post by one of my favorite Substack food friends, Betty Williams, I added something new to the weekend. A KitchFort Large Silicone Ice Cube Tray in orange for my mother, because big ice cubes deserve big occasions. Whiskey, cocktails, mocktails, your daily water requirement. All of it elevated by one beautiful, stackable, completely unnecessary but absolutely essential piece of orange silicone. I may have also ordered the yellow one for myself. I couldn’t resist.

Some rituals you inherit. Some you stumble into. Some you order in a two-pack.

The Recipe

Her favorite cake has always been angel food. Not because it’s fancy. It isn’t. Not because it’s complicated. It’s not that either, though it does have opinions about greased pans and proper cooling technique. She loves it because it’s light and floating and a little bit magical, and because, for as long as she can remember, it has meant celebration.

This year, I made it from scratch. No box. Just cake flour, egg whites, baker’s sugar, a touch of almond extract, and enough love to justify the stand mixer. Topped with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, because some things don’t need improving, just showing up.

Angel Food Cake with Strawberries & Whipped Cream

The Ritual Invitation

What does your birthday ritual look like? Is it a gathering or a quiet dinner? A cake that’s always the same or one that changes every year? A game that runs too long because nobody wants it to end?

Tell me in the comments. I'd love to know.

Leave a comment

The Ledger Entry

84 years. A phone full of love. A lion asleep in the shade. One shepherd changing the water level from a safe distance. Mexican Train going long into the night. One cake worth making from scratch.

Some weekends write themselves into the ledger without any help at all.

— Jennifer

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about living. Food, wine, memory, and whatever the day puts on the table. All essays are free at jenniferannblair.com.

From the recipe box: Helen’s Quick & Easy Strawberry Dessert.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

Angel food cake is one of those rare things that looks like it should be difficult and isn’t. Airy, fluffy, melting on the tongue like cotton candy but considerably more refined, this vintage sponge dates to the 1800s and has a mysterious history rooted in whispers of Near and Far Eastern origins.

Made with cake flour, baker’s sugar, egg whites, cream of tartar, and fine salt, it reaches its peak with vanilla, almond extract, and a splash of citrus. Top it with fresh fruit and whipped cream, and it becomes something else entirely: an edible canvas. Make it yours.

This is my mother’s favorite cake. So much that it usually comes from a box, because when she wants it, she wants it now.

For her 84th birthday, I made the classic version from scratch, just for her. She ate two slices. She didn't say anything for a moment. That was the review. It was worth every egg white.

Notes

1. Angel Food Cake doesn't care for grease. It's fussy like that. So don't grease the pan. And it prefers to cool upside down. Reminds me of Archie.

2. Immediately out of the oven, invert the pan onto the neck of a bottle or rack and cool for 2-3 hours to prevent the cake from collapsing. The best tube pan to use has a removable bottom, which makes it easier to remove the delicate cake cleanly.

3. Cake flour is low in gluten and perfect for those whose bellies resist traditional flour. I use Swans Down Cake Flour or King Arthur Unbleached Cake Flour when baking cakes.

4. Remove eggs from the refrigerator before you start. Separate the yolks from the whites while still cold, then let the whites come to room temperature before whipping. They'll have more lift and the cake will rise beautifully.

5. Serve with whipped cream and fresh berries. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, on their own, mixed, or cooked into a compote.

6. Pair with an iconic Italian Moscato d'Asti.

Once everything is ready, gather 'around the table and toast to Mom!

I know she’d say it’s better than the box. She’d be right.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

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257 Years is a series on the history of wine in Southern California. Part One introduced the family thread that started it all. This is Part Two.

This week, we turn back to the Vine and step onto a boat crossing from Spain to Mexico, headed for a land not yet called California.

I’m excited to tell this story. To call you to the table, to circle up and listen together. Their story, our story. I’m waiting for the questions, the interruptions, the surprise. If you're a curious human like me, this one is for you.

I have a habit of being drawn to the question underneath things. And this week, I’ve been following a vine. Literally. A five-century journey of a single grape, the way it feels to pull on something and find it leads somewhere unexpected.

From a sun-scorched plain in the heart of Spain, onto a ship, across an Atlantic Ocean, into the desert of Mexico, and out in two directions — south through Peru and Chile and over the Andes into Argentina, north through Baja California and into the soil of San Diego in the summer of 1769. A single grape variety. Five centuries. Four continents. And a story that turns out to be the foundation of everything California wine became. And everything it nearly lost.

Let me show you what I found.

257 Years: Spain, Mexico, and the Vine That Crossed an Ocean: Part Two.

There are vines in Cucamonga, California, right now that are over 100 years old.

Most people drive past them on the 10 freeway without knowing they’re there. The land looks like everything else in the Inland Empire. Dry, sprawling, squeezed between warehouses and subdivisions. But those old vines are still in the ground. Still producing.

And a winemaker named Rajat Parr, one of the most respected in California, co-founded a wine company called Scythian, named after the ancient nomadic warriors of the Eurasian steppe. The vineyards Scythian works with, the company says, have “defied all odds to remain rooted in the ground.” The goal: to tell their stories in the glass once more, and to safeguard California wine history before it disappears.

Here’s the thing about those vines.

They didn’t start in Cucamonga.

They started in Spain.

Castilla-La Mancha. Early 1500s.

Flat and relentless, a high plateau in the geographic heart of Spain, the land Cervantes chose for Don Quixote because it embodied a particular stubbornness, a refusal to be defeated by hostile conditions. Brutal summers. Hard winters. Soil as pale and thin as bone.

The grape grown here was called Listán Prieto. Dark-berried, drought-resistant, relentlessly productive. Not a grape of celebrations or courts. A workhorse, valued for toughness and yield, for surviving what would kill a more delicate vine.

In the 16th century, Listán Prieto was carried from Castilla-La Mancha to the Canary Islands. Those volcanic islands rising from the Atlantic off the northwest coast of Africa, the last landfall before the open ocean.

The Canary Islands were the crossroads of the known world. Every Spanish ship heading to the Americas stopped there: water, food, livestock, seeds. And vines. Living cuttings, wrapped carefully, tucked into the hold, carried west toward a continent that had never tasted European wine.

The vine went with the ships.

Mexico. 1524.

Hernán Cortés had just finished conquering Tenochtitlan. He was building a new civilization on the ruins of the old one, and he understood that civilization required wine. For the Church. For the settlers. For the fundamental European belief that to plant a vineyard was to plant permanence.

So he issued a decree. The Ordenanzas de Buen Gobierno — the Ordinances of Good Government, dated March 20, 1524. Among its mandates: every holder of an indigenous labor grant was required to plant 1,000 vine shoots annually for every 100 people under their care. The ultimate goal was 5,000 vines per 100 inhabitants. Penalties for non-compliance.

The vine was not optional. It was the law.

The grape they planted was Listán Prieto, carried from the Canary Islands. In Mexico, it became known simply as the Mission grape. For nearly a hundred years, it remained. And quietly began to change. In the hands of farmers, friars, and Indigenous laborers across New Spain.

From Mexico, the grape moved in two directions. South, with Spanish missionaries and conquistadors, into Peru by the 1550s, Chile by 1554, and across the Andes into Argentina, where it took on new names: Negra Corriente, País, Criolla Chica. Same vine, different soils, different stories.

But before it moved north, it found shelter.

In 1597, in the desert of Coahuila, Franciscan friars founded the Mission of Santa María de las Parras in a valley ringed by mountains, fed by underground springs, and protected from the raids that would devastate vineyards farther north. They found wild vines already growing there. Calcareous soils that suited the Mission grape. They planted. They made wine.

That mission site is where Casa Madero stands today — the oldest continuously operating winery in the Americas. Nearly 430 years of unbroken production, from one valley in the Mexican desert.

The vine had found its first real home in the New World.

The Road North.

From Parras, the Mission grape moved steadily up the spine of New Spain, on mules, in the hands of Franciscan friars, following the mission system northward through New Mexico, Texas, and Baja California.

In 1697, Juan María de Salvatierra planted vines at the Loreto Mission in Baja California, beginning a chain of plantings that would eventually reach Serra in San Diego, seventy-two years later.

The vine moved the way all important things move, slowly, carried by people with purpose, planted wherever those people stopped long enough to believe the place might hold.

San Diego. July 16, 1769.

Father Junípero Serra, 55 years old, traveling on a chronically infected leg so painful he had to be lifted onto a mule for parts of the journey, raised a cross on Presidio Hill above a bay on the Southern California coast, said Mass, and founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá.

The first European settlement in Alta California. The first of twenty-one missions.

In the weeks that followed, they planted the Mission grape.

The vine arrived in San Diego with a force that wasn’t only spiritual. The mission system Serra founded depended on the labor, often forced, of the Kumeyaay people whose land it occupied. The grape that crossed an ocean to reach this soil was planted, pruned, and harvested by people who were largely forbidden from drinking it. That story will run alongside this one for the rest of the series.

By 1771, Serra had moved north to found Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, just east of what is now Los Angeles. The vines planted there, what came to be called the Mother Vine, or the Ramona Vine, are still alive. Over the centuries, the Mission grape at San Gabriel crossed with Vitis girdiana, the native Southern California grape, producing a hybrid found nowhere else on earth. The Spanish vine had married the California one.

In 2020, a fire destroyed much of the Mission’s roof and many of its priceless artifacts. The Los Angeles Vintners Association — a small group of winemakers working to revive the city’s lost winemaking tradition — harvested grapes from the surviving historic vineyard and made a half-barrel of Angelica, the fortified dessert wine historians consider the first true California wine.

One of the winemakers said it tasted like cherry cordial. A flavor profile, he said, unique in the world.

The Mission grape spread up the California coast to San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Carmel, and San Francisco. Twenty-one missions, and at each one: a vineyard. By the early 1800s, Mission San Gabriel alone was producing tens of thousands of gallons of wine and brandy annually, supplying other missions, settlers, and trade routes along the Pacific coast.

And it centered on Los Angeles. The city that would become the original wine capital of California, the story we’ll tell in the next installment of this series.

Which brings us back to Cucamonga.

The old vines that Scythian Wine Company is working with today — those hundred-year-old survivors along the 10 freeway — they are the direct descendants of what Serra planted. The Mission grape’s lineage runs through them. The story that began in Castilla-La Mancha crossed the Atlantic, survived the desert of Mexico and the long road north through Baja California, and arrived here. In this soil. And somehow stayed.

Enough clonal variation occurred over centuries of geographical separation that the Mission grape of the Americas and the Listán Prieto of the Canary Islands now grow as distinct expressions of the same vine. The genetic thread is unbroken — but the journey itself shaped them differently. The vine that landed in San Diego in 1769 had become something that belonged to this continent, this soil, this story.

That’s what a vine does, given enough time and enough miles.

It becomes the place it grows.

The Ledger Entry

One grape, five centuries, four continents. Known as Listán Prieto in Spain, Mission in California, País in Chile, Criolla Chica in Argentina, Negra Peruana in Peru. The thread never broke.

If your family carried something with them, a recipe, a vine, a name, a habit you can’t quite explain, I’d love to hear about it. The thread doesn’t have to be wine.

I'm at the table. Write back. I read every one.

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257 Years is a series on the history of wine in Southern California. Part One introduced the family thread that started it all. This is Part Two.

Part Three: The City of Vines publishes May 31: Los Angeles as the original wine capital of California, the labor that built it, and the collapse no one fully talks about.

From the series:

• Part One → 257 Years: How Southern California Lost and Found Its Wine

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about living — food, wine, memory, and whatever the day puts on the table. All essays are free at jenniferannblair.com.

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Before Archie, there was Negra.

An English pointer, beautiful and certain of herself, who climbed into my lap uninvited in a backyard in Hungary while her parents watched from a comfortable distance. I brought her home with me. We had the most fun together. When she passed at twelve, I was lost in the way you are when a dog goes, not just sad but unmoored, like something that had been quietly holding the room together was suddenly gone.

I told myself I couldn’t do it again.

I meant it for years.

Then a post appeared in my feed. A German Shepherd needed a home. I jumped in the car and went to see him.

What I learned in that visit: Archie had lived with a family until he was five. When Covid arrived, his family surrendered him — reasons unknown, the way reasons so often go unknown when animals are returned. The only no-kill shelter in the valley took him in, which saved his life, because a dog like Archie, sensitive and large and already grieving, would not have lasted the noise and chaos of a regular shelter. He spent fourteen months there. Then one day at a rehome house with two dogs and eight cats, which lasted exactly as long as you'd expect.

Then I showed up.

He liked me immediately. He jumped into my car. We drove home.

It was an ordinary January day. But a happy one.

He was a lunatic for the first two months. Jumping on every piece of furniture. Throwing up from stress. Doing all the things a dog does when he’s trying to believe that this time might be different, that this person might be the one who stays. He needed to test it. I understood.

He’s a 100-pound baby now. Black and tan with a white star of fur on his chest and a little pit bull in his face that you can see if you look. He’s eight, almost nine. He’s been at my side, literally, ever since that January morning.

His morning ritual: he wakes me at six by bouncing on the bed until I get up. He dances and jumps on his tennis ball while I prepare his food. He eats it all in seconds. Then he either grabs a toy and shakes it triumphantly or rockets through the doggy door to bark at whatever neighbor has had the audacity to exist near the castle.

When I cook, he becomes Hootch — named for the drooling that begins the moment anything hits a pan. He talks. Whines, barks, full sentences of complaint, because to him, I am simply too slow at making anything.

He’s not wrong.

He’s three years with me, and exactly where he belongs.

Tomorrow is National Adopt a Shelter Pet Day. I don’t tend to organize my life around calendar holidays, but this one I’ll take. Because I almost didn’t get another dog. Because Archie almost didn’t make it to me — one wrong family away, one regular shelter away, from a very different ending.

If you’re thinking about it, this is me telling you to go. Visit the shelter. Sit on the floor. See who comes to you.

They will jump in the car. They always know.

The Ritual

An Afternoon Worth Marking

The Ritual is about the ceremonies we build around ordinary time. The things we do that tell us — and the people and animals around us — that this moment counts.

When something important happens, I cook. Not to celebrate exactly. More to give my hands something true to do while the rest of me catches up with what just occurred.

The afternoon Archie came home, I should have made Clara’s oatmeal cookies. I know that now. Great-grandmother Clara Baker’s recipe box holds a lot of wisdom in a small space, and her oatmeal cookies, with their unexpected cloves, their butter and lard mixed together, their sweet milk, are exactly the kind of thing you make on a January afternoon when your life has just quietly shifted.

I’m making them now, three years late. Archie will get his own version. The two of us in the kitchen, each with something worth eating, marking the day in the only way that makes sense.

The Recipe

Clara’s Oatmeal Cookies

This recipe comes from Clara Baker’s recipe box, written in her hand. I’ve kept it true to her. The cloves are not a mistake. Archie gets his own cookies.

Makes approximately 3 dozen | Prep: 15 minutes | Bake: 10 to 13 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 c. flour

• 2 c. rolled oats

• 1 t. cinnamon

• 1 t. cloves

• 1 level t. baking soda

• 2/3 c. butter and lard, mixed (or all butter — the older truth is the mixed)

• 1 c. sugar

• 2 eggs

• 4 T. whole milk

• Vanilla, to taste

• 1 c. raisins, chopped

Method

Sift the flour, oats, cinnamon, cloves, and baking soda together. Melt the butter and lard, then stir in the sugar. Add the eggs, milk, and vanilla. Combine with the dry ingredients. Fold in the raisins.

Drop by spoonfuls onto a well-greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350°F until just golden at the edges — about 10 to 12 minutes. Clara didn’t specify the temperature. This is my best interpretation of what her oven instinctively knew.

The cloves are the thing. Warm, quiet, a little unexpected. Like most good inheritances.

Notes

This can all be done in today’s mixer, quicker, and slightly easier, though I chose to make it the way Clara would have - spoons, whisks, bowls.

I did use a modern cookie scoop, testing the cookies at 1 tbsp and 2 tbsp. The larger scoop made larger cookies — duh — but also required longer cooking, 14-16 minutes.

Clara's Oatmeal Cookies

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The Recipe

Archie’s Cookies

For Hootch: A Dog-Safe Cookie

Archie’s own. Simple, safe, made with love, and fully aware that he will eat his in approximately four seconds.

Ingredients

• 1 c. rolled oats

• 1/4 c. peanut butter (unsalted, xylitol-free — check the label every time)

• 1 ripe banana, mashed

• 1/4 c. unsweetened applesauce

Method

Mix together until a soft dough forms. Roll into small balls and flatten slightly on a parchment-lined sheet. Bake at 350°F for 12 to 14 minutes until firm. Cool completely before offering to Hootch.

He will still drool through the entire process. This is unavoidable.

Notes

I used a dog bone cookie cutter for fun. I’m sure I like it better than he does. He couldn’t care less. Just wants the treat!

Made 10. You could certainly get more out of the small rolled balls, 20 or so.

Archie's Cookies

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The Ritual Invitation

This week’s invitation is simple.

If you have an animal at your side, mark the day you got them. Not the birthday — the arrival day. The day they jumped into your car or crawled into your lap or appeared in your feed at exactly the right moment.

Cook something. Put their name in it if you want. Tell someone the story.

If you’ve been thinking about a dog, a cat, or any creature that needs a home, tomorrow is Adopt a Shelter Pet Day. The no-kill shelters need you. The dogs who’ve been waiting need you. Go sit on the floor. See who comes.

And if you’re not ready, that’s okay too. You’ll know when you are. A post will appear in your feed. A dog will jump into your car.

It will be an ordinary day. But a happy one.

The Ledger Entry

Who is at your side right now, and what’s the story of how they got there? Leave it in the comments. The ledger holds both people and animals, and every arrival story is worth keeping.

— Jen.

From the recipe box: Clara’s Lemon Glaze Cake, or browse the full Hearth.

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We had three days together. The first afternoon, we stopped at Farm in Palm Springs, that warm, farmy pocket of good food surrounded by Coachella people, fueling up before the festival, then to HALL to pick up wine, then to my mother’s for dinner. The next day was hers again. And the morning after that, I had them come to me. My dining table, the one that doesn’t get enough use. Tall ceilings, morning light, green visible through the window. We ate the pie. The coffee was long, the conversation longer.

Lea and I are similar. We both prefer the smaller room. The cup of coffee over the party of ten. The one-on-one chats over the loud gathering, where someone always needs to be the center of it. There’s a kind of relief in sitting across from someone who already knows this about you without having to say anything.

We stayed at that table for a long time.

It’s been a full few weeks.

The Vine series launched. The oven ran hot on Helen’s pie, and I made it again. The Dinner Bell got a new home — thedinnerbelluncorked.com — same table, properly set. I’ve been researching, writing, publishing, updating, and building, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I forgot to just sit down.

The table reminded me.

I brought the pie. Helen Carnes’s cream pie, made twice now, with California blueberries and whipped cream and a pinch of nutmeg. A decadent breakfast. They were up for it. Every slice disappeared. Each element good on its own: the cream filling, the jammy blueberries, the cold drift of whipped cream on top. And together, something better than any of them separately.

Earlier, when we arrived at my mother’s, I opened the door from inside, and Archie somehow already knew. Before Lea was even visible, he was hollering — that full-body German Shepherd announcement that is equal parts bark, conversation, and pure joy. He is not an easy dog with people. Hesitant, protective, opinionated about strangers. But Lea. And my sister Jackie. And my mother. For them, he hollers. For them, he runs. He covered Lea’s face in the kind of greeting that leaves no ambiguity about how he feels, and then spent the afternoon near the waterfall, the sound of it putting him slowly to sleep in the heat.

He understands something about people that takes the rest of us longer to learn.

Lea has moved on to Missouri now, to visit more cousins, to gather around more tables. My sister Julie is there. The family spreading itself across the country the way families do, finding each other in kitchens and around chairs, catching up on the things that matter.

This is what the table does. It gathers. It gives you somewhere to finally sit down.

The Pulse: Calm

The moment when you stop running toward the next thing and let the present one be enough. A dining table that deserved a morning. A pie made twice, finally right. A dog who hollers for the people he loves and sleeps by the waterfall when the day is done.

From the Ledger

The Ritual: Archie came home on an ordinary January day and never left. Clara Baker’s oatmeal cookies, a shelter pet, and the afternoon everything quietly changed. Coming Wednesday.

The Closing Bell

Go find your table this week. The one that doesn’t get enough use. The one with the right person across from it and nowhere to be. Bring something worth eating. Stay longer than you planned.

Join the ledger. Listen for the bell. I’ll see you at the table.

— Jen.

Helen Carnes cooked in her everyday clothes, in a kitchen so small you couldn’t turn around if two people were standing in it. I was somewhere between seven and ten years old. She was in her late seventies. The counter was tiny. The stove was close. She smiled. Patient, calm. She directed me to do a few small things with care.

She was born in 1896. Her family had come from Bavaria in the early 1800s, moved through Pennsylvania, through Ohio, and finally settled in Indiana. She lived through Prohibition, the Depression, two wars. She cooked through all of it. For her children in the 1920s, for her grandchildren after that, for great-grandchildren like me, in a kitchen that never seemed to get any bigger.

She didn’t need an apron because cooking wasn’t something she put on. It was just what she did. Quietly. And if you wanted to help, you could.

She died at 83. The recipe box went to my Aunt Kathy.

I’ve been thinking about Helen lately. About the black book, written in fancy serif, where her recipes live. About the note at the top of this one: Mary Jane recipe. Mary Jane was her daughter. My grandmother. Which means this recipe moved between them, mother to daughter, daughter’s name written in her mother’s hand, the way these things travel.

I could make any pie. But I keep coming back to this one. Old Fashioned Cream Pie. Six ingredients, a technique so simple it almost sounds wrong. You spread the dry mixture in an unbaked shell. You pour the cream and milk over it. You trust the oven.

What I didn’t know when I started was that Helen’s recipe is almost certainly her family’s version of Sugar Cream Pie — the official state pie of Indiana, a Hoosier staple for generations. Of course it is. The ingredients are different from the standard version, the method distinctly hers, but the spirit is the same. A humble, honest pie, made from what was always in the pantry, baked until it set. She didn’t need to call it anything special. It was just what she made.

Helen would have made her cream pie in the winter or for a holiday. I’m making it in April, for the blueberries I’m adding, two months ahead of her blueberry season, because California runs on a different clock. The San Joaquin Valley, a few hours north of here, starts its blueberry harvest now and carries it through June. Half of California’s agricultural output comes from that valley. The blueberries in my April market didn’t come from my backyard — they came from one of the most productive farming regions on earth, running a full season ahead of Indiana’s. Same fruit, earlier sun, different soil. She would have found that remarkable, I think. Maybe a little extravagant.

The base is hers. The method is hers. I’m just bringing what the season is offering right now. Fresh blueberries, a little sugar, cooked jammy and bright, spooned over the top and left to set. Her cream pie underneath. My whipped cream on top.

Some recipes just wait for the right kitchen to find them.

The Recipe

A note before you begin: this recipe comes from Helen’s black book, written in her hand, Mary Jane’s name at the top, but I’ve changed the margarine to butter and added the blueberry layer as my own contribution to the lineage.

A note on ovens: I made this pie, and my oven ran hot, which darkened the crust more than I wanted. Watch yours carefully in the final stretch. Every oven has its own opinion about baking times. Start checking at 40 minutes. The pie is done when the filling is thick, bubbling, and a light crust has formed on top. If yours comes out darker than expected, know that the filling can still be perfect underneath.

This is also a pie worth making twice. The first time you’re learning the recipe. The second time you’re making it.

The Pastry: Helen’s Method

If you choose to make the shell from scratch, I’d encourage it. Makes 2 crusts; freeze the second for next time.

• 2 C flour

• 1 t salt

• ⅔ shortening (Crisco or vegan)

• ¼ cup cold water

Sift the flour with the salt.

Remove ⅓ C of this mixture and set aside in a small bowl. Add ¼ C cold water to the reserved flour and mix to form a smooth paste.

Add ⅔ C Crisco or vegan shortening — both work — to the remaining flour (1⅔ C). Cut the shortening in until the pieces are the size of small peas. Add the flour paste to the shortening-flour mixture. Mix thoroughly until the dough comes together and can be shaped into a ball.

Divide into two parts. Roll each out to about ⅛ inch thick on a lightly floured surface. Use one for this pie. Wrap the second and freeze it.

This is Helen’s pastry method, likely drawn from an original Crisco recipe or the same tradition. I used a vegan shortening. It worked perfectly. The paste technique creates distinct, reliable flaky layers regardless of which shortening you use. She knew what she was doing. The recipe holds up across a century and a few ingredient swaps.

Helen’s Old Fashioned Cream Pie

From the recipe box of Helen Carnes, Indiana

Serves 6 to 8 | Prep: 20 minutes | Bake: 50 to 55 minutes | Chill: 2 to 3 hours or overnight if adding blueberries

For the Filling

• 2 T flour

• 1 T cornstarch

• ¾ C sugar

• ¼ t nutmeg

• 2 T butter, softened

• 1 C heavy cream

• 1 C whole milk

Mix flour, cornstarch, sugar, nutmeg, and butter together until crumbly. Spread evenly in an unbaked 8-inch pie shell. Pour the cream and milk over the top. Do not stir.

Bake at 425°F until the pastry is light brown and a crust has formed on the filling (about 10 minutes). Gently break the filling crust with a rubber spatula and stir the mixture carefully. Reduce the heat to 350°F and bake until the filling bubbles thick and a light crust forms on top (40 to 45 minutes — start checking at 40).

This is the moment you trust her. It looks improbable until it doesn’t.

Remove from oven and cool completely before adding the blueberries.

For the Blueberries (Jen’s Addition)

• 3 C fresh blueberries (California season April through June)

• 1 T sugar

• 1 T of fresh lemon juice

• Pinch of salt

Combine 2 cups of the blueberries, sugar, lemon, and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir gently until the berries release their juice (about 5 minutes), then add the remaining cup of blueberries and continue stirring until the mixture thickens to a jammy consistency (about 5 more minutes). Cool completely, then spoon over the top of the completely cooled pie. Refrigerate 2 to 3 hours until set.

The blueberries are the one place I departed from Helen. She would have made the most of whatever the Indiana summer offered. I used what California is offering right now. The pie belongs to both of us.

For the Whipped Cream

• 1 C cold heavy whipping cream

• 1 T sugar

• 1 T vanilla bean paste

Chill the bowl and wire whisk attachment for 30 minutes. Mix on medium-high until you have soft, stiff peaks. Cool until ready to serve. Lasts for 12 hours in the fridge.

To Serve

A slice of pie, a dollop of cream, a pinch of nutmeg, and a sprig of mint.

That’s all it needs.

Helen's Cream Pie With Fresh Blueberries

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The Pairing

Helen would have poured coffee. Strong, black, exactly right for this pie. If you want to honor that, do the same.

If you want to wander a little, a Moscato d’Asti is what she could have reached for on a good occasion. Gentle bubbles, stone fruit, honeyed and soft. Nothing that asks too much. A late harvest Riesling works the same way, with a little more structure, the acidity cutting through the cream in a way that makes both better.

If you want to step out even further, here are a few more worth considering:

Brachetto d’Acqui: Slightly sparkling, strawberry and rose, naturally low in alcohol and gently sweet. It mirrors the blueberry compote without competing with it. Elegant, unexpected, and genuinely beautiful with cream.

Lambrusco: Fun, fizzy, earthy. Choose an Amabile or Dolce style — sweet enough to match the blueberries, with enough fizz to cut through the cream. Serve well chilled.

Australian Shiraz: This is an unexpected choice, yes, and possibly the most interesting one. Warm, spiced, dark-fruited. The pepper notes find something in the nutmeg. This is the pairing that will definitely start a conversation.

Pour what feels like a small celebration. That’s all this needs to be.

The Ledger Entry

What recipe are you holding that you haven’t made yet? The one still in someone else’s handwriting, waiting in a box, waiting for the right afternoon. Or the one you’ve made and it didn’t work, and you made it again anyway because you knew it was worth figuring out. Leave it in the comments. The Hearth is yours as much as it’s mine, and the ledger is long enough for all of it.

Join the ledger. Listen for the bell. I’ll see you at the table.

— Jen.

Not relief exactly. More like the hush after a door closes. You stood in a room and said something true, and now the room is empty, and you’re standing in the hallway, wondering if anyone was listening.

I published the first post in the Vine series this week. 257 years of Southern California wine history, two great-grandfathers, a draft card, a valley buried under freeways. I’ve been researching and writing it for months, and now it exists outside of me, which is the strange thing about publishing. The work stops being yours the moment it goes out. It belongs to whoever reads it now. I hope it finds the people it’s meant for.

That’s the week that was. History. Archives. 1769. The weight of what got buried.

Now it’s Sunday.

Outside my window, the desert is doing its best April impression, which turns out to be extraordinary. Everything is green right now, genuinely, improbably green, the kind of green the Coachella Valley only manages for a few weeks before the summer heat arrives and reasserts itself. Blue skies. A good breeze. Seventy-five degrees and worth every one of them. Somewhere not far from here, tens of thousands of people are at a festival doing the thing festivals do — music and heat and the joy of being briefly somewhere that feels like nowhere else.

I’m at my desk with a cup of coffee — Archie’s on the couch.

It’s, genuinely, a perfect morning.

Yesterday I went to the kitchen to make Helen Carnes’s cream pie for the first time.

Helen was born in 1896. She cooked in a kitchen so small you couldn’t turn around in it. Her recipes live in a black book in fancy serif, passed down through my Aunt Kathy, and they are, I’ll be honest, often a question mark. They rarely come with clear directions, temperatures, or quantities that make obvious sense. Rarely with any of the reassurance a modern recipe provides.

This one has four lines — in my dream.

The pastry worked beautifully. The blueberry compote, California berries, a little sugar, no lemon, came out jammy, bright, and exactly right. The filling set the way it was supposed to: thick and creamy.

But the oven had other ideas.

It ran hot, the crust darkened more than I wanted, and I had to pull it out ten minutes early. The filling was still perfect underneath, but not fully cooked. The pie was a work in progress. Not the one I wanted to photograph and hand you on Wednesday. One more try, and we'll know for sure whether it's the oven or the recipe — or both.

I’m making it again.

This is the thing nobody tells you about cooking from old recipes. The first time is rarely the real time. The first time you’re learning the recipe. The second time, you’re actually making it and hoping it comes out right. Helen probably made this pie a hundred times without thinking. I’ve made it once. I have some catching up to do.

The second pie is coming this week. Fingers crossed the crust will be perfect like it was, because the pastry recipe worked. The blueberries will be sweet and saucy, as they were, because they were my recipe from years of making jams and sauces. The whipped cream will be dolloped on top with a pinch of nutmeg. And the cream pie's interior will be fully cooked and edible. The pie will be perfect. Or it won't be. Either way, I'll have learned something Helen already knew.

One week you’re in the archive, diving into threads that go back 257 years. Next, you’re standing at the counter with a question and a hot oven, making something Helen made without thinking, in a kitchen you can still picture, in a house that no longer exists.

The recipe is the archive. The kitchen is the excavation. And sometimes you have to make it twice. Especially when the recipe is 80 years old, and the person who wrote it isn't around to show you.

The Pulse: Making

The moment when the research ends, and your hands come alive. When history stops being something you read about and becomes something you do. It’s a different kind of learning, a different kind of knowledge. Slower. More forgiving. And considerably more likely to involve a pie that needs to be made again.

From the Ledger

The Hearth: Helen’s Old Fashioned Cream Pie with fresh California blueberries. Her recipe, my kitchen, one lesson already learned. Wednesday, April 22.

The Closing Bell

It’s a beautiful Sunday. The weather is the kind that makes you want to stay in it as long as possible, the kind the desert offers like a gift before it takes it back in June. Go be in it. Set something good on the table tonight. And if you have a recipe you've been meaning to try from someone who's no longer here to show you how — this might be the week. Even if you have to make it twice.

Join the ledger. Listen for the bell. I’ll see you at the table.

— Jen.

257 Years is a series on the history of wine in Southern California. This is Part One.

Los Angeles was once the wine capital of California. There were eighty wineries in Cucamonga alone. At one point, more vineyard acreage grew here than in Sonoma and Napa combined.

I didn’t know any of that the morning I found the draft card.

I was fiddling with my phone, following the thread that comes from always thinking about wine, not just the drinking of it, but its history, its ritual, the land, and the people who worked it. I went looking for ancestors who might have worked in the industry. I already knew about my Bavarian great-great-grandfathers, vine-dressers in the old country. I went looking for more.

And I found them.

Thomas James Tatton. Carpenter. Ontario, California. Employer: Padre Vineyard Company, Cucamonga, 1942.

I sat with that for a while.

Then I looked at his emergency contact. The person the government asked him to name in the event of a war. Mrs. J.P. Blair. 936 Horley Avenue, Downey, California. His daughter. Which means John Philip Blair, my other great-grandfather, was working in the same industry, in the same region, at the same time. Two great-grandfathers. Family connected by blood and by the vine.

I remember seeing oranges stretch for miles; that’s what Southern California once represented, renowned worldwide. Now, those oranges are mostly gone, and the groves have moved to Central Valley farmland and agricultural areas. Like the vines before them, they were displaced by the same forces: growth, development, and relentless land economics that always place more value on the ground than on what grows from it.

The vines came first. Oranges replaced them. Houses and freeways replaced the oranges. Each generation buries something the previous one built.

This is a story about what survives anyway.

I knew little about Southern California wine when I found these documents. I knew Temecula. That Napa dominated. The desert where I live is hotter now; open land is vanishing. That sense of loss led me to look back at what used to grow here, and why it stopped.

What I found was a story that starts in 1769 and isn’t finished yet.

The City of Angels. I have witnessed this era. But the City of Vines remains new to me. Los Angeles was once the original wine capital of California: there were eighty wineries in Cucamonga alone. At one time, there was more vineyard acreage here than in Sonoma and Napa combined. A label called Pride of Cucamonga sold in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston, until, over time, it disappeared.

It’s documented. The census records exist. The draft cards exist. The bonded winery licenses and the family names and the newspaper reviews calling Cucamonga wine “as fine an article as manufactured in the world” all of it is there, if you look.

Which means people know and forget. Or only those in the industry remember. Or we are all so trained to look north for California wine that we stopped looking at what was right under our feet.

I've been a little undone by it ever since.

This series is my attempt to uncover and understand the lost and reviving legacy of Southern California wine — what was built, what was buried, and what is now coming back.

It is not a straightforward history. It’s a personal excavation with a bottle of wine open on the table. And it will take a while.

I hope you’ll stay.

⁠What This Series Covers

Over the coming months, The Vine will follow the full arc of Southern California’s wine story, starting even before 1769 and before California itself, reaching back to Spain and Mexico. The narrative will move chronologically, showing the vine’s journey across two oceans and a continent before arriving in San Diego, which sets the historical stage for everything that follows.

Along the way, there will be field reports from wineries and AVAs. We’ll dig into the labor history that made all of this possible, and that most wine writing skips. Expect my great-grandfather’s draft card, a vine still alive at the San Gabriel Mission that’s older than the United States, and a question about what Southern California wine could become if the land survives long enough to find out.

Here is the rough shape of where we’re going:

Spain, Mexico, and the Vine That Crossed an Ocean: Before 1769, the Mission grape had already traveled from Castilla-La Mancha to the Canary Islands to Mexico. It arrived in California carrying 250 years of colonial history in its roots. That story deserves its own telling.

The City of Vines: Los Angeles is the original wine capital. The missionaries, the Mission grape, the boom, the diverse labor that built it all. The Indigenous workers, the Chinese immigrants, the Mexican and Yaqui laborers whose names are not on the wineries. The collapse no one fully talks about.

What the Freeway Buried: The Cucamonga district. Secondo Guasti, standing at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, watching floodwater, said, “Surely this is heaven’s doorstep.” Thomas Tatton, still showing up for work at the Padre Vineyard Company in 1942, the winery that held California Bonded License No. 1.

The Long Silence: Prohibition. Then came a brief, beautiful comeback, the “Pride of Cucamonga,” selling in a dozen American cities. But after that, the second collapse arrived, quieter and more permanent, as the freeways came, land values rose, and the vineyard families sold one by one.

Temecula is Fighting: The reincarnation. Heat-adapted grapes. Alicante Bouschet — Garnacha Tintorera in Spain, where it grows today in Castilla-La Mancha, the same region from which the Mission grape came. The sign on Rancho California Road that says Wine Country and means it.

Baja is Coming: The Valle de Guadalupe. What Mexico is building just south of the border, while Southern California rebuilds.

The Desert Wakes Up: The Coachella Valley. The South Coast AVA. The 2028 Olympics on the horizon. And a question I keep asking: if Castilla-La Mancha can grow serious wine in that heat and dryness, why not here? Anyone with me?

What We Owe the Vine: Land. Sustainability. What we lose when the open space disappears. What Southern California wine could become if we let it.

⁠One Thing Before We Begin

The California wine industry was not built by pioneers in the romantic sense.

It was built by Indigenous people working under the mission system, planting, pruning, harvesting grapes, they were largely forbidden from drinking. It was built by Chinese immigrant laborers who dug wine caves by hand and cleared land for farming. By Mexican and Yaqui workers. By Italian immigrant families who arrived with nothing and built wine empires in a valley that looked, to everyone else, like desert.

The story of Southern California wine is more diverse, more multiethnic, and more working-class than most people realize. That history deserves to be in this series, not as a footnote, but as the foundation. We’ll go deeper into it as we go. But I wanted you to know it’s here from the start.

⁠Where We Begin: 1769

The first planting of the Mission grape in California was done by Junipero Serra at Mission San Diego de Alcalá in 1769. The next vines were planted at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel in 1771 — a mission designed by Father Antonio Cruzado, born in Córdoba, Spain, whose Moorish architecture was directly inspired by the famous cathedral of Córdoba. The cuttings from San Gabriel were eventually used to start new plantings at Pueblo de Los Ángeles around 1786.

Mission San Gabriel became the wine mission. At its peak, it produced 9,000 gallons of wine and 3,000 gallons of brandy annually. It supplied other missions across California with the necessities of life. It was called the Pride of the Missions.

The vine that grew there is still alive.

Known as the Ramona Vine, it is one of the oldest cultivated grapevines in California — its exact age debated, its survival undeniable. It is technically a hybrid. A cross of the Mission grape brought over by Serra and the Southern California native grape, Vitis girdiana. Something that exists only here, from the meeting of an imported vine and California’s own soil. The trunk is now the size of a gnarled old tree, its branches stretching 24 inches thick along the mission pergola. Only six vines of this type are known to exist in the world.

In 2020, a group of Los Angeles winemakers harvested grapes from it and made wine for the first time in more than two centuries. Using techniques dating back to the mission era, they produced a half barrel of Angelica — the fortified dessert wine that historians consider the first true California wine. The wine tasted, one of them said, like cherry cordial. Unique in the world.

That vine survived two earthquakes and a fire that destroyed the mission’s roof. It survived Prohibition. It survived the decades when everyone forgot that Southern California ever made wine at all.

It is still there.

In a place most people drive past without knowing what they’re looking at.

That’s where this story begins. And in some ways, it’s also where it ends, with something old and stubborn and alive, producing fruit nobody expected.

The vine remembers what the freeway buried.

⁠The Ledger Entry

If someone in your family worked these vineyards, lived in these towns, made something from this land, I'd love to hear about it. Names, towns, the smallest detail. The vine remembers more than we do.

Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Leave a comment

257 Years is a series on the history of wine in Southern California. This is Part One.

Part Two traces the Mission grape from Spain to San Diego in 1769.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about living — food, wine, memory, and whatever the day puts on the table. All essays are free at jenniferannblair.com.

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This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something I recommend, I may earn a small commission — at no cost to you, and only for things I’d tell you about anyway.

I grew up in Huntington Beach. I was at the ocean a lot as a kid. It was less congested then, fewer people, more renowned surfers walking the street, waxing their boards. Cowabunga. It’s easy to get pulled toward a place you remember happily, toward the freedom we had as children, and I’ve felt that same pull every time I’ve visited Hawaii. There’s something about the soft, white sparkling waves hitting the sand, over and over, that your brain reaches for when it’s running on empty. A pool will do the trick in a pinch, but it’s just not the same.

I’m not in Hawaii. I’m here, at my desk, in the desert, where it’s April and the to-do list has a to-do list.

Today the weather is beautiful. Sunshiny, not too hot, a breeze coming through. What’s happening is that I see water everywhere. Not physically. But in my mind, and in my soul. My brain is heavy. I’m ticking off the to-dos. Taxes are in the middle of all of it, family visitors hitting the tarmac soon, and work keeps arriving whether I’m ready or not. The lounge chair is not a failure of ambition. It’s the body knowing it needs a break. I’ll get there. Probably not this week.

This is the Busy Bee week. You know this week. The one where the plate isn’t just full. It’s over full, tipping, and somehow more keeps arriving. Where you are both exhausted and wired at the same time, running on curiosity and caffeine and the particular stubbornness of someone who hasn’t figured out how to stop yet.

This week, I also did something small that cracked something open.

I typed four words into a search bar. First grape planted California. I was expecting Napa. The familiar story. The wine country we all know, the rolling hills, the tasting rooms, the legend.

What came back instead was 1769.

I knew there were vines along the highway from San Diego up through Cucamonga. But when it seems like a myth given current times, the freeways and the sprawl and the housing tracts, it’s hard to believe it was ever that real, that overpowering, that Southern California once held the weight of all the wine in California. I hear people whisper it, tell pieces of the story, mention Mexico, but in 2026, it’s hard to believe it. I was born here. My parents loved wine tasting. But the topic never came up, or if it did, I don’t recall it.

When my mom and I visited Santa Fe, we took in everything the mission had to share — the stories, the history, the people. Including the Spanish friar who founded nine missions in California, Junipero Serra, spreading Christianity and Spanish culture. He brought vine cuttings from Spain and planted them here. The first in San Diego. The second in Los Angeles.

When you go back this far, to 1769, you’re going to find good things and bad things. What happened in the past is not something to be proud of, including the evangelizing of Native Americans under the mission system, the forced labor that built those vineyards, and the people whose work made it possible. But what he did was plant — whether for sacrament, shade, or beauty — the vines made it to California. And some of them are still here.

From those first plantings spread a wine industry that ran through California’s conquest, the missions, the gold rush, a population boom, Pierce’s Disease, and Prohibition. Los Angeles earned a nickname most people have never heard. The City of Angels, yes — I’ve been alive for that. But the City of Vines? That’s new to me.

There were eighty wineries in Cucamonga alone. Eighty. The whole thing nearly became a California wine region before development and disease, and Prohibition buried it under concrete and time.

The history is documented. The census records exist. The wineries have names, addresses, and license numbers. And somehow the story still got lost. Buried under freeways, overshadowed by Napa, forgotten by the very people who grew up driving past the vineyards. We are so trained to look north for California wine that we stopped looking at what was right under our feet.

I found my great-grandfather in the middle of it. His name was Thomas James Tatton. He was a carpenter. In 1942, he listed his employer on a government form as the Padre Vineyard Company, Cucamonga, California.

I’ve been a little undone by that ever since.

The Pulse: Discovery

The thing you didn’t know was there, waiting in a search result, a census record, a conversation you almost didn’t have. Discovery doesn’t always arrive when you have time for it. Sometimes it arrives in the middle of tax season, when your plate is already too full, and it sits down anyway and refuses to leave.

That’s the good kind of overwhelm. The kind worth being tired for.

From the Ledger

The Vine: I went looking for my great-grandfather and found a wine industry nobody talks about anymore. The story starts in 1769, and it starts right here. Wednesday.

The Hearth: Helen Carnes’s cream pie is about to be made for the first time. Her recipe, my blueberries, a California spring. Wednesday, April 22.

The Ritual: The afternoon Archie jumped into my car, and everything quietly changed. Coming April 29.

The Closing Bell

The lounge chair will wait. It always does. In the meantime, there is work worth doing and wine worth discovering and a table always worth coming back to. Go find the thing hiding in plain sight this week. You might be a little undone by it too.

Join the ledger. Listen for the bell. I’ll see you at the table.

— Jen.

If you made Doug’s pork tenderloin last week, this is what comes next.

If you didn’t, make it first. Then come back here. Because the second meal is worth the first one.

Sometimes just the act of creating something from nothing inspires others to do the same. Something you love. Something delicious. Something easy. Something that brings the outdoors in. The farm fresh vegetables, the fruit on the trees, the breeze coming through the open slider, the afternoon light warming the counter, the giggles you get from dancing in your kitchen while making up a recipe as you go. This is so much about sharing your love of food with others, whether it’s an all day masterpiece or just a couple of things you threw together because it sounded good in your head.

There is something deeply satisfying about opening the refrigerator the day after a good dinner and finding the leftover tenderloin still sitting in its marinade, the liquid keeping it tender and flavorful overnight. I peek in and out of the fridge, door opening and closing. Thinking. Tinkering. Creating. The music goes on. The kitchen fills with something that smells like possibility. And without much of a plan, something new begins to take shape.

This is how I cook, often. No recipe card, no measurements, no plan. Just the refrigerator, the farmers market haul, whatever calls to me. And on this particular afternoon, a leftover pork tenderloin quietly waiting to become something else entirely.

I pulled out the pork. Cut it into small pieces. Peeked into the fridge again. What have I got? Red onion, peppers, tomatoes, avocado, a head of red cabbage, cilantro, limes. A container of roasted red salsa. Cotija in the back. Tortillas in the drawer. I may be slightly obsessed with Mexican food. Having that bounty in my kitchen is fairly regular. Then I think about the citrus trees in the yard, and somewhere in the back of my mind, a margarita with a tajin rim and three kinds of citrus sounds like the perfect thing to pair with the dish I just invented in my head, with my eyes, inspired by the music and the heat outside and the sustainability of it all.

I have a little of my Great Grandma Helen in me, I think. Always looking at what’s in the kitchen that may not last much longer and needs to show off its magic before it goes.

The table filled itself. All on its own.

I’ve been thinking today about the recipe boxes from Clara and Helen. The dishes that showed up at the table, passed down through generations, often never written down, surviving because someone kept making them and someone else kept watching. Those are the ancestral recipes. The inheritance. And somewhere in that lineage is this instinct I carry. The one that opens the fridge, takes stock, and makes something from whatever is there.

But there is another kind of inheritance being made right now, in every kitchen where someone opens the refrigerator with no plan and makes something their family will ask for again and again. The California spring taco spread you invented on a Tuesday afternoon. The margarita recipe you refined until it was exactly right. The dish that didn’t come from a recipe box but from your own life — what you love, where you live, what the season is offering.

That is you making the ancestral recipes for the coming generation. Without knowing it. Without meaning to. Just cooking the way you cook when you have good ingredients and the music is on and you hope someone will love what’s on the table.

This is one of those dishes.

Put the music on.

Open the slider.

Let's get started.

This is a kitchen-dancing kind of meal. Here’s what’s playing at my house.

This Week’s Pulse: Reinvention

The best second acts don’t try to repeat the first. They take what’s already there and make something entirely new from it.

Jen’s Leftover Pork Mexican-Inspired Soft Tacos

By Jen Blair | April 8, 2026

Sometimes you just can’t eat it all — and that’s a very good thing.

Doug’s grilled pork tenderloin spent two days in the refrigerator soaking in its soy-based marinade, the flavors deepening, the meat staying tender and juicy. What started as an Easter Sunday centerpiece became the foundation of something entirely different. A California spring taco table built from fresh vegetables, creamy avocado, cotija crumbles, roasted red salsa, and soft warm tortillas. Sweet, tangy, bright, and completely its own thing.

This is not a leftover meal. This is a second celebration.

The tenderloin that graced Easter dinner becomes something new the next day, cut small, warmed gently, wrapped in a soft tortilla with everything the table can offer.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6 | Prep 20 minutes | Warm-up 5 minutes

Doug’s Pork Tenderloin

• Leftover pork tenderloin, cut into small pieces

• Reserved marinade for storing and warming

The Pickled Onion — make ahead

• 1 red onion, finely diced

• Red wine vinegar, enough to cover

• Pinch of salt

For the Table

• Soft flour or corn tortillas, warmed and wrapped in a towel

• 1 yellow bell pepper, sliced

• 1 red bell pepper, sliced

• 3-4 Roma tomatoes, chopped

• 2 cups shredded red cabbage

• Fresh cilantro, torn at the table

• Radishes, thinly sliced

• 1 avocado, sliced at the table

• Cotija cheese, crumbled

• Roasted red salsa

• Limes and lemons for squeezing

Preparation

1. Pickle the onion: Place the diced red onion in a small bowl. Cover completely with red wine vinegar and a pinch of salt. Let sit for at least 30 minutes (overnight is better). It will turn a beautiful deep pink and mellow into something bright and sharp that cuts through the richness of the pork perfectly. Make this first. It only gets better with time.

2. Warm the pork: Store the leftover tenderloin in its reserved marinade (the liquid keeps it tender and the flavor deepening overnight). When ready to serve, warm gently in the microwave in short bursts, just enough to take the chill off without drying it out. Cut into small pieces and place in a bowl for the table.

3. Prep and set the table: Slice the yellow and red bell peppers into thin strips. Chop the tomatoes. Shred the red cabbage. Thinly slice the radishes. Leave the avocado whole until serving — slice it at the table so it stays fresh. Crumble the cotija into a small bowl. Tear the cilantro and leave it loose so people can grab what they want. Cut the limes and lemons into wedges. Now set everything out in its own bowl or vessel and let people build their own. That’s the whole point. The gathering, the reaching, the choosing. Nobody waiting for a plate to be handed to them. The table does the work. You just have to show up.

4. Build and eat: Warm tortilla. Pork first. Then whatever calls to you — cabbage for crunch, pickled onion for brightness, salsa for depth, cotija for salt, cilantro torn fresh, a hard squeeze of lime over everything. Eat immediately. Build another.

Jen's Leftover Pork Mexican Inspired Soft Tacos

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A California spring taco table built from fresh vegetables, creamy avocado, cotija crumbles, roasted red salsa, and soft warm tortillas.

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Meet Tajin

Tajin came onto the scene in the late 1980s in Jalisco, Mexico and made its way into the U.S. in the early 1990s. I only discovered it a couple of years ago when a favorite Mexican restaurant of mine served margaritas with red rims and I asked what it was. Now I use it on everything. My nephew loves to pour a bit into his palm and lick it up. It’s a tangy explosion of flavor and a salty boost all at once.

In Mexico, tajin is a staple of street vendors, and we all know how many extraordinary tacos you can find from a Mexican street vendor. It’s made from mild chili peppers, dehydrated lime juice, and sea salt. Zingy, not hot. Extraordinary on vegetables, popcorn, watermelon, pineapple, mango, cucumbers, corn, jicama, tacos, and margaritas. A flavor boost without the heat.

Citrus Tajin Margarita

By Jen Blair | April 8, 2026

Fresh from the farm, three citrus juices, an orange simple syrup, tequila blanco, a tajin rim. Refreshingly cold and perfect alongside your homemade Mexican-inspired tacos.

Ingredients

Make 2 drinks

Orange Simple Syrup

• 1 cup sugar

• ½ cup fresh orange juice

• ½ cup water

For the Rim

• Tajin

• One lime wedge

The Margarita

• 3 shots white tequila, 100% agave

• ¾ shot fresh lemon juice

• ¾ shot fresh lime juice

• ¾ shot fresh grapefruit juice

• ½ shot orange simple syrup

• Ice for shaking and serving

Preparation

1. Make the simple syrup: Combine sugar, orange juice, and water in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until the sugar dissolves completely. Do not boil. Cool completely before using. Keep in the refrigerator for two weeks. Make extra, you will want it again.

2. Rim and fill the glasses: Run a lime wedge around the rim of each rocks glass. Press into tajin until evenly coated. Fill with ice and set aside.

3. Shake and pour: Combine tequila, lemon juice, lime juice, grapefruit juice, and orange simple syrup in a shaker with ice. Shake hard for 15 seconds. Strain over the iced glasses. The color should be pale gold, slightly cloudy with citrus. The tajin rim will bleed its red into the edges. Drink immediately alongside the tacos.

Jen's Citrus Tajin Margarita

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Fresh from the farm, three citrus juices, an orange simple syrup, tequila blanco, a tajin rim. Refreshingly cold and perfect alongside your homemade Mexican-inspired tacos.

Download

The Ledger Entry

What dish have you invented that your family now asks for every time? Not a recipe you inherited but one you made up. From the refrigerator, from the farmers market, from a Tuesday afternoon when you had good ingredients and no plan. Leave it in the comments. The Hearth is yours as much as it’s mine, and the ancestral recipes of the next generation are being written right now, in kitchens exactly like yours.

This morning I woke up smiling, taking in the sun, listening to the birds, and thinking about family, kiddos, pretty dresses, and a glass or two of champagne.

We are heading out to Temecula to the vines, the mustard flowers, the green hills, the food, the sun, the ocean breeze, into the beauty of Southern California wine country on a spring morning. Kids will be running around hunting for eggs and candy, maybe a few face paints, playing with bunnies or chasing each other in circles until they fall down laughing. A small group of our family at the table. Yummy food thought about and prepared warm just for us while we laze in the sun and do absolutely nothing but watch the show. The outfits, the costumes, the palatial space filled with food and drink and dessert and joy on this lovely Easter Sunday. An adventurous day with the people you love, and if we’re lucky a visit from the Easter bunny.

I grew up hunting for eggs in backyard grass, looking for plastic shells stuffed with candy and, as we got older, money. And the occasional explosion of color that ended up in everyone’s hair when you found the confetti eggs. Chaotic and joyful, lots of giggling, completely worth it. Until suddenly the kids have grown up and you find yourself driving to Temecula for champagne instead.

This week on The Hearth we have a second meal for you. If you made Doug’s pork tenderloin last week, Wednesday’s post is what comes next. One tenderloin, two tables, a California spring taco spread so colorful it looks like the season, or the confetti, decided to show up on a tortilla, and a citrus tajin margarita that belongs at every spring table from here forward. It’s waiting for you Wednesday.

However your Easter looks today, I hope it finds you exactly where you want to be. At a farmers market, or a table filled with old friends and new, savoring spring’s bounty of sunshine and peace. Pausing to watch the world around you. Baby lambs and baby birds arriving, plants showing their happy green leaves, and us humans doing what we do best: gathering, dining out, or whipping up a table of tacos and a cocktail or two.

Join the ledger. Listen for the bell. I’ll see you at the table.

— Jen

The platter arrived at the table, and I wasn’t expecting it to look like that…

Crusty, caramelized, deeply brown - sliced and presented like something from a restaurant kitchen. I’m not a huge pork lover, if I’m honest. But my Aunt Kathy had offered to make it, mentioned it was a recipe from my cousin Doug, and I decided to go along with it. What I didn’t know was that she had called her daughter-in-law, Kelsey, that morning just to get the recipe right, because it had become one of her favorites, and she wanted to make it for us. Kathy is one of us, a fellow foodie who understands exactly why certain recipes deserve to be passed along. A retired nutritionist, she loves developing, collecting, and protecting the recipes she loves. This was one of them. Doug had brought it to Wisconsin from Missouri, and once Kathy tasted it, it earned a permanent place in her rotation.

Kathy had marinated the pork early that morning so it could become even more tender and succulent by dinner. Dan, my uncle, handled the grill. He always does. Our family is full of people who know how to tend a grill. Pizza ovens, fancy grills, 1980s originals, grill pans, cast iron everywhere. You learn it without being taught.

When I tasted the pork, I was pleasantly surprised. Tender, moist, smoky, savory, sweet, all at once, from a marinade built from six pantry ingredients. Kathy paired it with asparagus, roasted and plated with red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I’m not sure whether the asparagus was Doug’s idea or hers, but it was perfectly matched. I’ve since simplified the finishing. Warm the reserved marinade to a boil, add a little Dijon mustard, and pour it over the pork and asparagus. A buttery garlic glaze on the asparagus is optional but highly recommended.

Thanks, Doug, for creating and sharing such a delightful dish. Thanks, Dan, for grilling up a masterpiece. And thanks, Kathy, for carrying the recipe from Wisconsin to California, and for making it for us that day.

This recipe now lives in our family history, right here in The Dinner Bell.

Easter comes this Sunday. I wanted you to have a delicious but supremely simple dish to bring to your table. As the kids in our family have grown older, the egg hunts have slowed, the master cooking and cleanup have quieted, and this year we make our way to Temecula to let someone else wait on us and sip in the goodness of the season. But I remember all those lovely years running around various family yards chasing eggs, or helping the little ones find them, wink-wink. One year, my sister’s very good friend, Myra, added confetti eggs to the mix. The adults had a blast. My niece was not impressed by all that confetti in her hair until the candy showed up, at which point she forgot all about it. It’s still one of the best memories I have.

Spring is at its best right now. Asparagus is at its best. Pink, red, orange skies at sunset. Birds settling into new nests. Confetti in everyone's hair. Doug's pork tenderloin carries all of that now. Simple, bright, and worth gathering around.

As many of you know, I love Pinot Noir. And so does pork.

Coeur de Terre means heart of the earth in French, which feels exactly right for a Hearth post about family and inheritance. This is an estate wine with 100% of the fruit from their own vineyard in the Willamette Valley, vibrant younger vines combined with older blocks for structure and balance, grown in a remarkable mix of sedimentary, metamorphic, and volcanic soils, and farmed organically. The wine’s bright cherry and earthy undertones are a natural counterpoint to the sweet-tangy marinade, and its silky texture complements the pork’s tenderness.

Pour it early. Decanting a Pinot isn’t always necessary, but it helps a young wine open up and show its best. On Easter morning, you probably have the vessel, the patience, and the time. Let it breathe while the grill heats up.

This Week’s Pulse: The Dish That Stayed

Some recipes arrive without ceremony and never leave. This is one of them.

The Recipe

Serves 6-8 | Prep: 15 minutes plus 4-6 hours for marinating | Cook: 25 minutes

The Marinade

1 cup soy sauce (or tamari for gluten-free)
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup white vinegar
½ cup orange juice
2 tsp kosher salt
½ tsp garlic powder

Combine all six ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves completely. Remove from heat and let cool slightly. Pour over the tenderloins in a shallow dish or zip-lock bag.

The smell at this stage - sweet, tangy, savory - is the first sign you’ve made something worth waiting for. Marinate for 4-6 hours or overnight in the refrigerator.

The Pork

3 lbs pork tenderloin (2 tenderloins)
2 tbsp olive oil

Remove the tenderloins from the marinade and reserve the liquid. Heat a grill or grill pan over medium heat and add the olive oil. Grill on all sides until deeply browned, caramelized, and charred at the edges - internal temperature 145°F.

This is not the moment to rush. The crust is everything. Rest for 3-5 minutes before slicing.

The Sauce

Reserved marinade
1 tsp Dijon mustard

While the pork rests, pour the reserved marinade into a small saucepan over medium-high heat. Add 1 tsp Dijon mustard, then bring to a boil and whisk to combine. Reduce until slightly thickened and glossy.

It will deepen from gold to amber. Watch it carefully. This sauce is what makes this plate extraordinary.

The Asparagus

1 lb fresh asparagus, trimmed
½ cup butter, softened
3 garlic cloves, minced
Salt and pepper to taste

Bring a wide pot of water to a boil. Place the trimmed asparagus in a steamer basket above the water. Cover and steam for 5 minutes, until bright green and just tender with a little life left in it. While steaming, whisk the butter, garlic, salt, and pepper.

Plate & Serve

Slice the pork into medium-thin rounds and arrange on the plate. Lay the asparagus alongside. Drop a spoonful of softened garlic butter directly onto the warm asparagus and let it melt into and over the spears. Ladle the reduced marinade over both the pork and the asparagus.

Doug's Grilled Pork Tenderloin With Asparagus

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The Ledger Entry

What’s on your Easter table this year? Have you ever had a dish that showed up one day and never left? The one that came from a cousin, an aunt, a neighbor who handed it over without ceremony, and suddenly it became a permanent member of your family recipe collection?

And what about the rituals? The confetti egg someone started one year ago, and now nobody can stop. The deviled egg plate that only comes out twice a year. The thing that happens every Easter without fail, whether anyone planned it or not.

Leave it in the comments. The Hearth is yours as much as it’s mine, and the table is long enough for all of it.

Not empty. Never fully empty when the people who were just here leave something of themselves behind. A coffee cup in the wrong cabinet. The particular way the light hits the table when someone else has been sitting at it. The good tired that follows a full house, the kind that settles into your bones and stays there like a reminder that something worth having just happened.

This year is shaping up to be the year of visits. People arriving, the table filling, the calendar marked with names rather than obligations. I am not taking any of it for granted.

Gratitude for the full house. Joy for the quiet after. Both things true at once, which is, I think, the definition of a life being lived well.

Easter is coming. This year it finds me at someone else’s table in Temecula — no kitchen, no cleanup, no reduced marinade to watch. Just a meal someone else thought about, wine country in the background, the particular pleasure of being taken care of. I’m looking forward to it more than I expected.

But before Sunday arrives, there is Wednesday. And Wednesday on The Hearth this week is the Easter dish that became a tradition the moment it arrived at our table. Doug’s grilled pork tenderloin, a Mexican leftover taco spread that turned dinner into two celebrations, and a citrus tajin margarita that belongs at every spring table from here forward. Make it before Easter. You’ll want it whether you’re hosting or not.

It’s waiting for you Wednesday.

However your Easter arrives this year, full house or quiet table, kitchen or restaurant, deviled eggs or tacos, I hope it finds you grateful for exactly what it is.

Join the ledger. Listen for the bell. I’ll see you at the table.

— Jen

The Ritual is The Dinner Bell's series on intentional living — and it begins at the table.

Every table tells you something about the people who set it.

Not just what they cooked or how they arranged the chairs. The deeper things. What they believed about time. Whether they thought an ordinary Tuesday was worth marking. Whether feeding people felt like a burden or a language. Whether the table was the center of the house or just the place where the mail piled up.

I have been fed at a lot of tables. I’ve been paying attention at most of them.

The first table I remember clearly belonged to my grandmother on my father’s side. A shiny round walnut surface in Anaheim, California, probably not large by any standard but enormous to a small child sitting at it. There were TV trays involved on the bigger nights, the kind that folded out with a satisfying click, and the smell of furniture polish that meant company was coming. She didn’t have a lot, my grandmother, but she gave generously with what she had. For my birthday she made me a cake covered in tiny animals. Giraffes, lions, monkeys, birds, whatever she could find at the store in the late 1960s. I was an animal lover from the beginning. Watched every nature show, read every story. Babar. Pippi Longstocking. Born Free. She knew. The cake was her way of saying so.

When my parents moved to Huntington Beach they bought a house with a proper dining room. Long, shiny walnut, seats six but expands to eight, mirrors lining the walls so the room doubled itself. You could see it from the front door. My little sister used to dance in front of those mirrors. I remember watching her and thinking the room was designed for exactly that, for seeing yourself in the middle of something joyful.

I sat at that table from the time I was seven until I was twenty-eight. It was never just a place to eat. My parents had wonderful friends, the kind who showed up in costume, themed from head to toe, food and drink to match. Chinese nights, Indian nights, American nights, the table transformed each time into something different and completely committed. Our friends were always welcome too. My parents never turned anyone away. The group would gather at that table the way groups gather when a house has decided it’s for exactly that purpose. The dining room connected to the kitchen so nothing ever felt separate. The cooking and the talking and the laughing all ran together, the walls covered in pictures and paintings and crafts my two sisters and I had made over the years. Evidence, everywhere, that this was a house being lived in fully.

Clara and Jesse Baker’s house was Victorian. Built-in cabinets, hidden cupboards, beautiful woodwork everywhere you looked. Red velvet rugs throughout, held to the stairs by gold stair rods. An oval room. An oblong table. A light overhead that, in my seven-year-old memory, rivaled the Phantom of the Opera. I’ll stand by that description even knowing I was small enough to make everything larger than it was. Some things earn their grandeur.

The table seated twelve or fourteen comfortably. When the whole family came, the food made its first appearance on the sideboard — a beautiful walnut cabinet, shiny and marble-topped, the kind we’d call a sideboard today. Everything passed around and then laid out there, dish by dish, until it was full. When the sideboard couldn’t hold another thing, the food moved to the table itself. The adults sat at the oblong table. The children got their own smaller tables nearby, which at seven years old felt completely official, like being trusted with something important.

If you were small enough and lucky enough and the table wasn’t entirely full of adults, you got to sit at the oblong table itself. That’s where I was when I looked up at that chandelier and decided it was the most magnificent thing I’d ever seen. I was seven. The room was oval and the light was warm and everyone I loved was talking over everyone else. I’ll allow myself that memory.

Jesse would have the radio on. A ballgame, or Glenn Miller drifting through the rooms. The porch and the grass were for drinks and snacks, for standing around, leaning against railings, the particular ease of people who don’t need to be doing anything in particular. Inside, the table was where the real gathering happened. The tall windows had their curtains pulled back to let the summer sun in. Nothing was fancy. Nobody said that word. The side tables held glass bowls filled with candy, the good kind, the kind that meant someone had thought about the children before the children arrived. The wedding cakes Clara made for other people’s most important days were assembled on that same oblong table, stories tall, navigated out the front door by Jesse and whoever he could recruit to help (usually my mom Joy and her sister Linda).

It was the most alive room I’ve ever been in.

The biggest gatherings happened somewhere else entirely. At my Aunt Sally and Uncle Lloyd’s cattle ranch, where the trees were a hundred years old and the barn had a loft tall enough to peer out from the top window and giggle down at the adults below. Ponds, open grass, family arriving from everywhere. Fold-out chairs on the lawn. People eating while standing and talking, or stretched out in the afternoon sun. Kids running through the grass, nobody keeping count of how many there were. My mother had two sisters and two brothers, and they all had children, and there were grandparents and great aunts and great uncles and their families too. On the biggest days it felt like everyone you’d ever loved was somewhere on that property.

Helen Carnes' table was different. Round and dark and shiny, set in a room of green walls and curtains. Smaller. Quieter. Helen was careful in the way that people who grew up on farms are careful. Nothing came out until it was ready, nothing was set until it was time. Everything from the garden, everything from the earth, nothing wasted. The table a natural extension of the values that ran the house. The candy bowls on the side tables though. Those were always there.

My table now is in the California desert. Crate & Barrel. Sustainable wood, square ends, light to mid-brown, seats four to six. Simple and intentional in the way that things you choose carefully tend to be. It is where I look out the window in the morning at whatever the light is doing to the mountains. It is where I photograph the wine, the recipes, the rituals, where The Dinner Bell comes to life before it lands in your inbox. It is becoming my studio. The place where the work happens and the light is always right.

Quieter than Clara and Jesse’s oval room. It holds fewer people. But it is set with the same intention. The belief that the table is always worth returning to.

This Week’s Pulse: Gather

The tables we grew up around shape the tables we set. I didn’t understand that until I started writing this post, until I traced the line from that oval room in Indiana to this quiet desert morning and realized the intention had traveled with me even when the chandelier hadn’t.

Set your table this week. Even if it’s just for you. Even if it’s just coffee and the morning light. Notice what it feels like to do it on purpose.

The Ledger Entry

Tell me about a table you remember. Not the food necessarily. The room, the people, the feeling of being in it. The tables we carry with us are worth naming. Leave yours in the comments. The Ritual is richer for knowing what shaped you.