The Elegant Art of Dining: Bohemian San Francisco, Its ... - iMedia

as active as the goats for the sides of the hill are alive with them.
Let us walk first along Grant avenue and do a little window shopping. Just
before you turn off Broadway into Grant avenue, after passing the Fior d’Italia,
the Buon Gusto, the Dante and Il Trovatore restaurants, we come to a most
interesting window where is displayed such a variety of sausages as to make one
wonder at the inventive genius who thought of them all. As you wonder you
peep timidly in the door and then walk in from sheer amazement. You now find
yourself surrounded with sausages, from floor to ceiling, and from side wall to
side wall on both ceiling and floor, and such sausage it is!
From strings so thin as to appear about the size of a lady’s little finger, to
individual sausages as large as the thigh of a giant, they hang in festoons, crawl
over beams, lie along shelves, decorate counters, peep from boxes on the floor,
and invite you to taste them in the slices that lay on the butcher’s block. One
can well imagine being in a cave of flesh, yet if you look closely you will discover
that sausage is but a part of the strange edible things to be had here.
Here are cheeses in wonderful variety. Cheeses from Italy that are made from
goats’ milk, asses’ milk, cows’ milk and mares’ milk, and also cheeses from
Spain, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, and all the other countries where they
make cheese, even including the United States. These cheeses are of all sizes and
all shapes, from the great, round, flat cheese that we are accustomed to see in
country grocery stores, to the queer-shaped caciocavallo, which looks like an
Indian club and is eaten with fruit.
There are dried vegetables and dried fruits such as were never dreamed of in your
limited experience, and even the grocer himself, the smiling and cosmopolitan
Verga, confesses that he does not know the names of all of them.
As you go out into the street you blink at the transformation, for you have been
thousands of miles away. You think that surely there can be nothing more. Wait
a bit. Turn the corner and walk along Grant avenue toward the Hill. See, here is
a window full of bread. Look closely at it and you will notice that it is not like
the bread you are accustomed to. Count the different kinds. Fourteen of them
in all, from the long sticks of grissini to the great slid loaves weighing many
pounds. Light bread, heavy bread, good bread, soft bread, hard bread, delicate
bread, each having its especial use, and all satisfying to different appetites.
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