By Mike Dunne
Bee Food Editor
Published Jan. 18, 1998

Mark Twain wrote of the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, not the celebrated sauteed frog legs.

Maybe his timing was off. Such delicacies weren't uncommon in the Mother Lode during the Gold Rush, especially by the time Twain arrived at Angels Camp, in the winter of 1865. He even patronized a boarding house with a French chef. But perhaps streams were high, interrupting supplies, throwing prospectors back on their standard diet of dried pork, boiled
potatoes, bread and beans. Especially beans.

"Beans and dishwater for breakfast at the Frenchman's; dishwater and beans for dinner; and both articles warmed over for supper," groused Twain in his journal for Jan. 23, 1865. Soon after James Marshall in 1848 spotted the first glimmer of gold at John Sutter's sawmill on the American River, grub available to prospectors gathering along the Sierra foothills was coarse,
erratic and generally unvaried.

"Mother wants to know what we eat, drink and wear," wrote one Argonaut in a letter home. "First we eat bread, meat, rice, molasses, our drink is water, tea, coffee, and some times a snort of brandy."

Malcolm J. Rohrbough, author of "Days of Gold, The California Gold Rush and the American Nation," writes: "The basic diet
seems to have been the same everywhere: meat (fresh or preserved), bread or biscuits, and coffee or tea with plenty of sugar."

Deprivation and malnutrition, particularly scurvy, were not uncommon among miners, but tended to be suffered more by the "extremely imprudent and the grotesquely unlucky," observes historian Joseph R. Conlin, author of "Bacon, Beans, and Galantines," a study of eating habits in mining settlements of the Western frontier.

In the foothills, prospectors were surrounded by antiscorbutic native wild plants -- wild onion, wild garlic, watercress, lamb's quarters and the like -- but often either didn't recognize them or didn't know what to do with them.

The exodus to the gold fields was largely male, from a society where women and servants did the cooking.

"I feel greatly the want of counsel and advice from you or others in biscuit-making and in some approved, or improved, method of brewing coffee," pleaded one gold seeker to his wife. "I have always been inclined to deride the vocation of ladies until now."

Conlin noted that "some miners told of filling a pot with rice but no water, placing it on the fire, and wondering why the result was not an edible fluffy piece."

This ineptitude at cookery provided restaurateurs their own bonanza, and restaurants and boarding houses
flourished through the region.

And when Argonauts ate out, they had an inordinately fond appetite for fancy French food, then emerging as a
cachet of wealth and status in the United States. Even if they hadn't already hit pay dirt, they were wildly
optimistic that they would, and didn't hold back their hunger for the likes of Champagne and oysters. Oysters
were so much a part of the Argonaut diet, the oyster beds of San Francisco were depleted by 1851 and schooners
had to sail farther and farther north to net the prized mollusks.

Exorbitant food prices often associated with the Gold Rush -- $1 for a slice of bread in Placerville, $2 if it was
buttered -- were common early on, and subsequently shot up during sporadic periods of high demand and low
supply. According to Gold Rush lore, a farmer at Coloma sold her pears when they still were blossoms, tagging each flower with the name of the purchaser; at the time, ripe pears sold for $2.50 each.

The food and drink trade was so lucrative early in the Gold Rush that even James Marshall
gave up the search for gold. He applied his carpentry skills to assembling barrels, planted a
vineyard behind his Coloma cabin, and started to make wine.

For the most part, however, shipments and prices soon stabilized. "Into the summer of 1850
prices shot up and down like a volatile stock market. There were shortages, but there also
were many gluts. Sacramento had so much bacon coming in that they couldn't sell it, and it
was used for landfill," said Conlin in an interview from his horse ranch in Oregon, where he
retired from California State University, Chico, two years ago.

"In the 1850s prices still went up and down, but not to ridiculous levels. That was over by
the summer of 1850."

Indeed, it's easier these days to find frog legs.