The History Behind the Food on Sacramento Restaurant Menus
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Lodi
How a railroad stop called Mokelumne Station became Lodi, the Tokay grape town whose farmers turned to wine grapes in the 1980s.
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Watermelon
How Lodi became the state’s Watermelon Center and lost the name, and how UC began breeding Klondike R7 on its wilt-infested ground.
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Apple Hill
How El Dorado County’s pear growers around Camino turned to apples after pear decline killed their trees, and opened their ranches to visitors in 1964.
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Florin Strawberries
How Japanese American families made Florin and Elk Grove a strawberry center, and what became of their farms after May 1942.
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Sturgeon and Caviar
The 19th-century sturgeon fishery the state closed in 1901, and how research at UC Davis helped Sacramento County farms raise white sturgeon in tanks.
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Almonds and Walnuts
From the 1910 almond exchange and its C Street plant to English walnuts grafted onto the valley’s native black walnut.
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Yolo Olive Oil
From the Mission olive trees John Wolfskill planted on Putah Creek to the olive mill the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation opened at Brooks in 2012.
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Delta Asparagus
The peat islands that grew 93 percent of California’s asparagus in 1929, and the crews who cut it.
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Tomatoes
How Sacramento’s canneries earned it the name Big Tomato, and how Yolo growers went from cannery tomatoes back to heirlooms.
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Sacramento Valley Rice
How the valley’s flood basins became rice fields after 1912, and why the fields now hold water and ducks all winter.
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Placer Mandarins
How the foothill fruit country the railroad built turned to satsumas after disease killed its pear orchards.
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Delta Pears
From the levees Chinese crews built by hand to the Courtland Pear Fair, the river towns behind Sacramento’s Bartletts.
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Chinook Salmon
From the first salmon cannery on the Pacific Coast, across the river from K Street, to the Sacramento’s first open season in three years.
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Capay Valley
From the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation’s homeland to Séka Hills olive oil on Sacramento menus.