Ever eaten an English Monkey? Not as horrible as it sounds: a mixture of bread crumbs, cheese, milk and eggs. The dish is one of many listed in The 49er Cookbook published by the Nevada County branch of the American Association of University Women.

The book's introduction says, "The Mother lode country of California is nourished not only by the legends but by the recipes of the 49ers. In many families, foods are being cooked as they were during Gold Rush days. These recipes of various lands and races, brought to the camps by people from all over the world when news of the great gold discovery spread, have served the miners well for over a hundred years."

The foods concocted in California's gold fields reflect the miners' wide range of nationalities.

Dutch Pea Soup includes onions, celery, peas - of course - and an ox tail with instructions to "boil for a long time."

English crumpets are another international food recipe gathered in this interesting and historical cookbook, which can be found at the Doris Foley Historical Library in Nevada City. It is delightfully illustrated by drawings done by local school students.

German bread dumplings sound like a heavy belly-filler, along with Swedish pancakes. Greek stew and Swiss steak represent those nations, which also contributed part of the nearly 100,000 young men who headed for California from all around the world, certain they would soon be rich.

Chicken Italian was on some camp menus along with the one food that remains available today, Cornish pasties. Pasties were usually made of meat and potatoes baked inside a pastry or bread shell. One observer said the definition of a mine was a hole in the ground with a Cornish man at the bottom eating a pasty.

Using the materials at hand the miners also fed on a regular diet of fried rabbit and duck. "Mock duck" dishes were made from turkey.

One recipe called for the cook to "cut up three pounds of chicken (you can use two squirrels instead)."

And the camp cooks often borrowed that great Latin flavor enhancer and disguise, Spanish sauce.

The recipes from the Gold Rush were preserved as they passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter, "just in my head." To prevent them from being lost forever, the University Women created this cookbook, whose sale once helped create college scholarships and sponsored foreign students who wished to study in the United States.

Food also was on the minds of barkeepers in San Francisco, who tried unsuccessfully to abolish the free lunch, instituted to keep patrons sober - and drinking. In November of 1854 San Francisco saloon proprietors met to try to end the increasingly expensive free lunch practice. After two meetings it became clear that unless every bar in town dropped the practice those few remaining free lunch bars would attract the lion's share of patrons.

The Golden Gazette reported the result: "So, free lunches are still on tap for the free-loaders."

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Copyright Don Baumgart, 2008