By Sharon Bowers

"I went to California for my honeymoon in 1981," says Sara Moulton, host of Cooking Live, "and I remember being blown away that everyone had fresh herbs in their backyard."   It was a sign of things to come. "On our way to Mendocino, we went to Boonville and we had a tossed green salad and a hamburger. The salad was 50 percent fresh herbs and the dressing was freshly made with garlic and herbs, and the hamburger was made with organic beef that had been grown on a nearby farm and ground to order, and the ketchup was homemade, and the bun was homemade. And it was one of the best things I'd ever eaten."

  So what is California cuisine? It's all about natural goodness, freshness and lots of fruits and vegetables: brick-oven pizzas on hand-tossed crusts with homemade fennel sausage, mesclun salads with herbs and toasted goat cheese, fresh breads from local bakeries, broiled Black Mission figs drizzled with locally made honey, sandwiches with sliced avocado and juicy tomatoes, grilled fish and poultry with piquant citrus salsas. "They use vinaigrettes everywhere to lighten things up," says Moulton.

  It makes sense that the temperate state where so much of the country's fresh produce is grown had begun to obsess about fresh ingredients. From north to south, the pleasant climate and long growing season encourage a light, summery approach to cooking, especially when tomatoes, avocados, citrus, herbs and lettuces are growing on doorsteps practically year-round. California's abundance allows cooks to paint with a very broad palette.

  Such a variety of ingredients results in a cuisine that is more about a general style than specific chefs, Moulton says. "People were starting to cook this way and the chefs were celebrating it. California cuisine is very ingredient-driven and the cutting edge chefs," such as Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Deborah Madison and Joyce Goldstein of restaurant Chez Panisse, Wolfgang Puck and John Ash at Fetzer Vineyards, "have understood that your dish is only as good as your ingredients. So the emphasis is on freshness, simplicity, locality. It was one of the first places that you started seeing all those artisanal cheeses and breads and olive oil." The emergence of world-class California wines in recent decades has inspired a constant search for the best food to pair with it.

  Thanks to its history and geography, California might even be called the first fusion cuisine. "Obviously it's a completely melting-pot culture from the Mexican and Spanish influence in the south, and the Asian influence in the north, and an international influence in the rest of the state," Moulton says. The gold rush attracted miners and others to the state. "One of the exciting things that happened is that these people brought seeds, such as artichokes." So influential were the habits of the settlers that nearly every artichoke eaten in the U.S. today is grown in Casterville, Calif.--and much of our garlic comes from California's town of Gilroy.

  And like so many other California innovations (movies, skateboarding), this kind of cooking has gradually spread to the rest of the country--a Cobb Salad found at your local diner and the ubiquitous mesclun salad are evidence of this influence. Similar to the pervasiveness of a Hollywood blockbuster, the cuisine's infiltration of the American cooking style arguably qualifies it as the essence of modern American cooking.