camping kitchen table prices image
MaRiLYn <3
For example, what did they cook?
also, what did the women who were bartenders wear?
Answer
Women were still mostly expected to not get involved and many of the earliest Gold Camps were all male domains. When women did get involved they did the grudge work: washing clothes and cooking and cooking during that era was labor intensive. In the crudest of camps one pot meals were the norm that meant one big pot, lots of water and the women or men would chop up meat and limited veggies (mostly potato and parsnips and turnips) into a cast iron pot and boil it all. I am tiored and weary so see link beow for Pioneer Cooking.
The other use for the few women in camp was for sex an activity out of fashion in 2010 but back then it was recognized as a normal human function.
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpioneer.html#pioneer
""Food historians confirm average '49ers did not cook. These male-dominated make-shift communities were served by a variety of inexpensive public eateries.
"Neither Kenoffel's Spokane Cafe nor Truax's English Kitchen claimed, as so many miners' restaurants did, to be the "one and only," the old original "Delmonico's of the West," "only beter." Like the large majority of mining camp eating houses, they unpretentiously provided ordinary everyday all-American meals fo bacons and eggs, soups, stews, steaks, roast beef, chops, potatoes, --and almost always oysters, of course--and the like for reasonable prices. There never was a day on which an argonaut could not get a substantial fill in San Francisco for a dollar. A full meal in Virginia City could run as little as fifty cents, one dollar for both breakfast and dinner if paid in advance. In rawer camps like Telluride, one-dollar to two-fifty-a-plate was the list price...Saddle Rock Restaurant advertised a dinner for a quarter. The mining towns teemed with cheap eateries. In fact, San Francisco and the rawest camps of the Sierra slope teammed with homey eating houses (or tents). They were "numerious, plentious, inviting and even cheap." Restaurants were among the very first businesses at the scene of every strike. Keeping a public tables was one of the first nonmining occupations to be found in a hundred "No Name cities." A "restaurant rush" followed closely on--when it did not lead in!-- the provisions rush. There are more than a few examples of "starving" forty-niners and Pike's Peakers who allayed their famine not by grubbing on wild plants, snaring beasts, seeking charity, or by fortuitiously buying a sack of flour, but by throwing their weary legs under a table at a not-too-distant restaurant. The reason for this is not obscure. In a society in which domestic cooking remaied woman's work, the first flood of population in every mining region was overwhelmingly male...'There was no such thing as a home to be found. Scarcely even a proper house could be seen. Both dwellings and places fo busines were tiher common canvas tents, or small rough board shanties, for frame buildings of one story...Meals were taken at eating houses, of which there was an immense number in every protion of the town. They were of every descrption, good, bad, and indifferent, and kept by every variety of people...'"
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier, (p. 152-153)
""
Peace//////\\\\\\\\\\\
Women were still mostly expected to not get involved and many of the earliest Gold Camps were all male domains. When women did get involved they did the grudge work: washing clothes and cooking and cooking during that era was labor intensive. In the crudest of camps one pot meals were the norm that meant one big pot, lots of water and the women or men would chop up meat and limited veggies (mostly potato and parsnips and turnips) into a cast iron pot and boil it all. I am tiored and weary so see link beow for Pioneer Cooking.
The other use for the few women in camp was for sex an activity out of fashion in 2010 but back then it was recognized as a normal human function.
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpioneer.html#pioneer
""Food historians confirm average '49ers did not cook. These male-dominated make-shift communities were served by a variety of inexpensive public eateries.
"Neither Kenoffel's Spokane Cafe nor Truax's English Kitchen claimed, as so many miners' restaurants did, to be the "one and only," the old original "Delmonico's of the West," "only beter." Like the large majority of mining camp eating houses, they unpretentiously provided ordinary everyday all-American meals fo bacons and eggs, soups, stews, steaks, roast beef, chops, potatoes, --and almost always oysters, of course--and the like for reasonable prices. There never was a day on which an argonaut could not get a substantial fill in San Francisco for a dollar. A full meal in Virginia City could run as little as fifty cents, one dollar for both breakfast and dinner if paid in advance. In rawer camps like Telluride, one-dollar to two-fifty-a-plate was the list price...Saddle Rock Restaurant advertised a dinner for a quarter. The mining towns teemed with cheap eateries. In fact, San Francisco and the rawest camps of the Sierra slope teammed with homey eating houses (or tents). They were "numerious, plentious, inviting and even cheap." Restaurants were among the very first businesses at the scene of every strike. Keeping a public tables was one of the first nonmining occupations to be found in a hundred "No Name cities." A "restaurant rush" followed closely on--when it did not lead in!-- the provisions rush. There are more than a few examples of "starving" forty-niners and Pike's Peakers who allayed their famine not by grubbing on wild plants, snaring beasts, seeking charity, or by fortuitiously buying a sack of flour, but by throwing their weary legs under a table at a not-too-distant restaurant. The reason for this is not obscure. In a society in which domestic cooking remaied woman's work, the first flood of population in every mining region was overwhelmingly male...'There was no such thing as a home to be found. Scarcely even a proper house could be seen. Both dwellings and places fo busines were tiher common canvas tents, or small rough board shanties, for frame buildings of one story...Meals were taken at eating houses, of which there was an immense number in every protion of the town. They were of every descrption, good, bad, and indifferent, and kept by every variety of people...'"
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier, (p. 152-153)
""
Peace//////\\\\\\\\\\\
Gold rush recipes?
Kat
What foods were freely available during the gold rush (and were affordable enough for people to buy)?
And does anyone have recipes for anything I could cook over an open fire? I can cook well enough in a modern kitchen but where I am cooking there is no stove or oven. Thanks.
Answer
California Gold Rush
The foods and recipes of Gold Rush California were as diverse as the people who lived in that place and time. It was a convergence of cultures (Anglo-American, Spanish, Chinese, Mexican etc.) and economic status (downright rich to dirt poor). Folks who ventured into towns could sample the finest Victorian fare or drink themselves into oblivion on cheap whisky. Camp fare was similar to what the pioneers ate on the Oregon trail: belly-filling foods made with local ingredients (freshly shot game, fruits & vegetables) and store-bought provisions (coffee, beans & bacon). As time progressed, so did the food. Sourdough bread was a staple of the forty-niners.
"With the discovery of gold, California...abruptly changed character. The territory had launched itself upon an agricultural career, but with the gold strike California's farms were abandoned, and so were its towns. As ships from the East Coast reached California, their crews promptly deserted and went gold hunting too; by July 1850, the harbor of San Francisco was clogged with five hundred vessels becalmed for want of crews. San Fransico was promoted from a small village named Yerba Vueina, "good herb," for a local plant with a mint-like flavor, to a thriving, bustling metropolis of 25,000 citizens, mostly miners. In 1849, eighty thousand new gold seekers entered California...Three-quarters of the gold hunters were Americans, bringin with them Anglo-Saxon eating habits destined to overwhelm Spanish-Mexican ideas. The same phenomenon already encountered on a frontier inhabited by a society with no women in the kitchen was now repeated, strengthening the American tendency to neglect culinary niceties: women made up only eight percent of California's new population, and in the mining areas only two percent. The successful prospectors were heavy spenders; they had to be when it came to food, which was outrageously expensive. Since nobody in California wanted to rais ti, everything had to be imported. Nevertheless, for unsuccessful, or not yet sucessful prospectors, San Francisco developed, iknt eh 1850s, relatively modest hotels and boarding houses, whose prices were reasonable in their context. Everybody sat down at a common table, and the food was hearty. Meanwhile, for epicurians among those who had struck it rich, a surprising number of French restaurants were opened. The first important one was named Le Poulet d'Or...For the moment, the spectacular potentiality of California as a grwoer of food was neglected. its new-found riches served chiefly, in this domain, to further developments of Oregon as a food-supplying state, catering to the California gold-rush population."
---Eating in America: A History, Waverley Root & Richard de Rochemont [William Morrow:New York] 1976 (p. 176-7)
"Hundreds of the accounts of westward mighration speak either of near-starvation or of having to make do with whatever might be at hand. A forty-niner, writing in his journal, described a meeting with another wagon train: "Their sugar, rice, beans & flour were also out & they had been living on nothing but hard tack & coffee, & coffee and hard tack. They had no shot guns and & of course took no game. This reconciled us, I assure you, & we censured ourselves for our past time growling, & find, instead of suffering, we have been feasting." His group, in fact, had been varying a diet of salt pork with "Jack Ass" rabbits on which, the journal says, "we fared sumptuously."
---American Heritage Cookbook and illustrated History of American Eating & Drinking, [American Heritage Publishing Co.: New York] 1964 (p. 57)
" 'A party recently left Joe's store at Mormon Bar for the Valley, and a friend of the Star furnishes the following statistiics-- showing the amount of "the necessaries of life" which is required for an eight day's trip in the mountains:
8 lbs potatoes.
1 bottle whiskey.
1 bottle pepper sauce.
1 bottle whiskey.
1 box tea.
9 lbs onions.
2 bottles whiskey.
1 ham.
11 lbs crackers.
1 bottle whiskey.
1/2 doz. sardines.
2 bottles brandy, (4th proof.)
6 lbs sugar.
1 bottle brandy, (4th proof.)
1 bottle pepper.
5 gallons whiskey.
4 bottles whiskey. (old Bourbon)
1 small keg whiskey.
1 bottle of cocktails , (designed for a "starter.")
From Hutchings' California Magazine, 1860'"
---ibid (p. 59)
California Gold Rush
The foods and recipes of Gold Rush California were as diverse as the people who lived in that place and time. It was a convergence of cultures (Anglo-American, Spanish, Chinese, Mexican etc.) and economic status (downright rich to dirt poor). Folks who ventured into towns could sample the finest Victorian fare or drink themselves into oblivion on cheap whisky. Camp fare was similar to what the pioneers ate on the Oregon trail: belly-filling foods made with local ingredients (freshly shot game, fruits & vegetables) and store-bought provisions (coffee, beans & bacon). As time progressed, so did the food. Sourdough bread was a staple of the forty-niners.
"With the discovery of gold, California...abruptly changed character. The territory had launched itself upon an agricultural career, but with the gold strike California's farms were abandoned, and so were its towns. As ships from the East Coast reached California, their crews promptly deserted and went gold hunting too; by July 1850, the harbor of San Francisco was clogged with five hundred vessels becalmed for want of crews. San Fransico was promoted from a small village named Yerba Vueina, "good herb," for a local plant with a mint-like flavor, to a thriving, bustling metropolis of 25,000 citizens, mostly miners. In 1849, eighty thousand new gold seekers entered California...Three-quarters of the gold hunters were Americans, bringin with them Anglo-Saxon eating habits destined to overwhelm Spanish-Mexican ideas. The same phenomenon already encountered on a frontier inhabited by a society with no women in the kitchen was now repeated, strengthening the American tendency to neglect culinary niceties: women made up only eight percent of California's new population, and in the mining areas only two percent. The successful prospectors were heavy spenders; they had to be when it came to food, which was outrageously expensive. Since nobody in California wanted to rais ti, everything had to be imported. Nevertheless, for unsuccessful, or not yet sucessful prospectors, San Francisco developed, iknt eh 1850s, relatively modest hotels and boarding houses, whose prices were reasonable in their context. Everybody sat down at a common table, and the food was hearty. Meanwhile, for epicurians among those who had struck it rich, a surprising number of French restaurants were opened. The first important one was named Le Poulet d'Or...For the moment, the spectacular potentiality of California as a grwoer of food was neglected. its new-found riches served chiefly, in this domain, to further developments of Oregon as a food-supplying state, catering to the California gold-rush population."
---Eating in America: A History, Waverley Root & Richard de Rochemont [William Morrow:New York] 1976 (p. 176-7)
"Hundreds of the accounts of westward mighration speak either of near-starvation or of having to make do with whatever might be at hand. A forty-niner, writing in his journal, described a meeting with another wagon train: "Their sugar, rice, beans & flour were also out & they had been living on nothing but hard tack & coffee, & coffee and hard tack. They had no shot guns and & of course took no game. This reconciled us, I assure you, & we censured ourselves for our past time growling, & find, instead of suffering, we have been feasting." His group, in fact, had been varying a diet of salt pork with "Jack Ass" rabbits on which, the journal says, "we fared sumptuously."
---American Heritage Cookbook and illustrated History of American Eating & Drinking, [American Heritage Publishing Co.: New York] 1964 (p. 57)
" 'A party recently left Joe's store at Mormon Bar for the Valley, and a friend of the Star furnishes the following statistiics-- showing the amount of "the necessaries of life" which is required for an eight day's trip in the mountains:
8 lbs potatoes.
1 bottle whiskey.
1 bottle pepper sauce.
1 bottle whiskey.
1 box tea.
9 lbs onions.
2 bottles whiskey.
1 ham.
11 lbs crackers.
1 bottle whiskey.
1/2 doz. sardines.
2 bottles brandy, (4th proof.)
6 lbs sugar.
1 bottle brandy, (4th proof.)
1 bottle pepper.
5 gallons whiskey.
4 bottles whiskey. (old Bourbon)
1 small keg whiskey.
1 bottle of cocktails , (designed for a "starter.")
From Hutchings' California Magazine, 1860'"
---ibid (p. 59)
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Title Post: What did women do during the gold rush?
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