Today I'm filming from the old mining town of
Cerro Gordo near Death Valley in California. Now back in the day this was a rough place, your
quintessential Old West Town, "a disagreeable burg, full of stout warm-hearted go-ahead men
who are tearing fortunes out of the bowels of the earth." So naturally my question is what did
these bowel tearing men like to eat? Well one popular meal was biscuits and gravy which I'm
making using a recipe from 1881. So thank you to trade coffee for sponsoring this video as we
eat like an Old West miner this time on Tasting History. Now back in the late 19th and early 20th century this was a thriving Community with number of saloons, restaurants, dance halls, hotels and other businesses all catering to the needs of the miners who were extracting silver and lead in the surrounding mountains. Now whether they were coming into town to eat or if they were staying out by the mounds and making themselves a good meal they relied basically on the three B's: beans, bacon, and biscuits, and last week I made the beans and bacon so this week I'm making the biscuits. Now sometimes they would use sourdough to make biscuits but very popular at the time was a combination of cream of tartar and saleratus. Saleratus being a salty form of baking soda. Now at that time there were not a lot of cookbooks coming out of the American West but I actually think I found kind of the perfect one for this because this mining town was said to have basically built Los Angeles and so I'm going to be working from 'Los Angeles Cookery' from 1881. "Cream of Tartar Biscuits Mrs. Milliken. One quart of flour, three heaping teaspoonfuls of pure cream of tartar, a piece of butter two-thirds the size of an egg, well worked in flour, one heaping teaspoonful of Babbit's salaratus, dissolved in sweet milk. Make the dough as soft as can be kneaded conveniently; roll a half inch thick, cut in biscuits and bake in a quick oven." Now there's nothing in this recipe that they wouldn't
have possibly had access to but milk would have definitely been a prized commodity and if they
were up in the hills they probably wouldn't have had fresh milk but they would have had access to evaporated milk. It was a fairly new invention from the 1850s by Gail Borden. You can use it basically just like milk though you can add a little bit of water if you want, and you could even use it in your coffee like the coffee that I'm making from today's sponsor Trade. Trade is a coffee subscription service that helps you make bette coffee at home, or in my case at a ghost town that you happen to be traveling to. Essentially you tell Trade what you like in a coffee, how often you drink it, and how you drink it and they will line you up a feed from 55 local roasters with over 450 different roasts. And that coffee is delivered to your door within just a couple of days of being roasted. And they have roasts that are perfect for any way that you take your coffee, whether it's French press, traditional drip, cold brew or like me making cowboy coffee today. You just heat a quart of water in a pot until it's just warm then you add about a 1/4 cup of coffee to that pot and let it slowly come to a boil. Boil it for about 4 minutes, then take it off the heat and pour a little cold water around the sides. That's going to force the hot grounds to the bottom of the pot. Then she's ready to go. Unfortunately I broke my Trade mug on the bumpy road up here but while I wait for a new one this tin cup did the trick. And right now Trade is offering 30% off of your first month
when you use my link in the description drinktrade.com/ maxmiller. That is 30% off of your first month. Then you will have coffee to make while you make your biscuits and gravy for which you will need: 2 cups or 240 grams of flour, 1 and 1/2 heaping teaspoons of cream of tartar, a half teaspoon of salt, 4 tablespoons of butter, a heaping 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, about 3/4 of a cup or 175 milliliters of milk, either regular milk or evaporated milk, and that is it, and you'll notice that I cut all the ingredients in half because I don't a need to make that many biscuits right now, this will still make about a dozen. So first whisk the cream of tartar and salt into the flour and then add the butter in little pieces and work it into the flour with your fingers, you want to leave some nice big pieces in there though. Then stir the baking soda into the milk and pour it into the flour mixture. I honestly don't know why she mixes it into the milk rather than just putting it with the flour which is what it would usually be done today but I'm going to follow what she says. Now work the dough until it just comes together. If you need a little more milk you can go ahead and add it but you just want to add enough to make the dough stick. Once you have a nice dough set it onto a lightly floured surface and knead it gently for just about a minute, you don't want to overwork it, and then press it out
or roll it out to about a 1/2 in thick. Then cut it into biscuits. And the scraps you can kind of roll out again and cut into more biscuits, it's a very forgiving dough. Now you can place these on a tray but more commonly back then they would have put into a well buttered or large greased cast iron skillet. Then set that in the oven at 425° F, 220° C and bake for about 15 minutes while we take a look at what else old miners in the Old West used to eat. On January 24th 1848 James Marshall working at a sawmill owned by Johann Sutter on the American River in California found a small shiny stone in the mill race. That was the first gold nugget found that kicked off the California Gold Rush, and within 3 years over 200,000 people made their way from all all over the world to find their fortune, during which time most of them lost a fortune because the price of everything absolutely skyrocketed and that included food. A breakfast in San Francisco that cost 15 cents
in 1848 would by the end of 1850 cost $6, a single egg could cost a dollar and a barrel of flour
went from $3 to $400, that is about $16,000 in today's money for a barrel of flour. And so even though at least at the beginning of the Gold Rush people were picking up gold off the ground most of them weren't keeping it, it was the people who were selling things to the prospectors. As Pier Burton said of the Klondike Gold Rush "The people who made money weren't the ones who found a gold mine. They found a man who found a gold mine." Now this rush of money didn't last very long and so eventually
prices came back down but basically whenever and wherever silver or gold was found this same
kind of crazy inflation took place, so because of that the foods that miners ate really ran the
gamut from pretty not great to unbelievably fancy. Now somewhere in the middle is perhaps the most
famous miner food and that is the Hangtown fry which supposedly was what you would order when you
finally struck pay dirt. The story goes that a miner having just found a load of gold stumbled out of the Sierra Foothills into Placerville, though at the time the town was called Dry Diggins though
due to their penchant for hanging people whenever they did anything bad it was more commonly
known as Hangtown. There he walked into the El Dorado Hotel, slapped a gold nugget on the bar, and ordered his favorite foods all to be fried up in one dish. That was eggs cooked in bacon grease, and then topped with fried oysters, and whether or not that story is actually true the dish did
become quite popular not just in that area where there were miners but all throughout the US at the time. Now it was especially popular in San Francisco where instead of canned oysters which is what many people had had to eat at the time they were able to eat fresh oysters. Oysters were one of the most popular foods during this period. I actually did a video last summer on the New York
oyster craze which is taking place around this same time. And it was so popular to eat oysters no matter who you were even if you were a miner out in the wilderness that within 3 years of the Gold Rush starting they had completely eaten away all of the oyster beds in and around San Francisco so they had to start bringing oysters down from the Seattle area. Now if eggs and oysters just ain't your thing cuz that's not really something that I would eat then there are even more exotic foods on the menu specifically Galapagos tortoise. See turtle soup which was usually made with green
turtle at the time was very, very popular and it was on menus everywhere, but it was rather pricey though if you had just struck it rich then pricey didn't cut it. You wanted something that could really show your opulent wealth and "[The Galapagos tortoise] is a choice luxury even more than that of the green turtle." Now while many were getting rich in gold, Caspar Hopkins realized that it was the tortoise trade that would make him his fortune. And so in 1850 he left San Francisco for the Galapagos
Islands in order to catch 100 tortoises which back in San Francisco could be sold to the miners at
$1,500 a piece or about $60,000 today. Now I am very happy to tell you that on his trip he did not
catch a single tortoise. He was a terrible tortoise hunter, but many other people were much better at it and during the 1850s they had really wiped out most of the Galapagos tortoises and they're still not even recovered to this day. Now eating these fancy exotic foods was not very common for
most people, and really only happened when they discovered a big load of silver or gold, and when they did this they tended to kind of spend it all. "It was no unusual thing to see a company of these men, who had never before thought of luxury beyond a good beefsteak and glass of whiskey, drinking their champagne at ten dollars a bottle, and eating their tongue in sardines, or warming in their smoky campfire their tin canisters of turtle soup and lobster salad." And while there were miners with their bags of silver and gold who could afford to eat high on the hog, or high on the tortoise, most miners diet was not this. "Our diet consists of hard bread, flour, which we eat half-cooked, and salt pork, with occasionally a salmon which we purchase of the Indians. Vegetables are not to be procured... Our drinking water comes down to us thoroughly impregnated with the mineral substances washed through the thousand cradles above us." And it wasn't just that they couldn't afford anything
better, it was that they couldn't find anything better because most miners were not living in and around big cities like San Francisco. Most were still looking for their riches in places like this in Cerro Gordo. Here a nice supply of groceries was really hard to come by and even with when you could find basic groceries you had to usually bid on them if you wanted to buy them. In 1855 Frank Mariott wrote about a small mining town where "The miners prefer buying everything at auction... presuming always that your constitution will stand a mixture of salt butter, Chinese sugar, pickles, and bad brandy. Joe Bellow was an auctioneer, and... long before his sale commenced he would place a keg of
butter, or a bag of dried apples, outside his store, and the miners would surround these luxuries like flies... and such is human nature, that even in the mines where few simpletons are to be found, there was no butter so rancid but Joe Bellow could not dispose of..." So miners in these small towns were fighting over even the meager of basic ingredients, which is why the lyrics to this 19th century miners song probably rang true for most. "In cabins rude, our daily food is quickly counted o're;
Beans bread salt meat is all we eat - And the cold earth is our floor." The bread mentioned in that song was one of two types. The first of course was hardtack. [clack clack] And the second was something so popular amongst the miners that it actually became synonymous with them sometimes they were called sour doughs. There is a reason that San Francisco is famous for their sourdough bread and it comes from the miners of this period. When you were up in the mountains for weeks, sometimes months at a time getting a hold of fresh yeast or even powdered yeast was not easy and so pretty much every miner above above their stove hung "a tin full of fermented dough, used in place of yeast for making
bread, biscuits, and flapjacks." Though sometimes it was said that if it was really cold the miner would actually sleep with his sourdough in his bed, under his blankets with him to keep it warm.
How sweet. Now while they were up in the mountains miners had to rely on their basic ingredients, and their usually very basic cooking skills to survive, to make their food, but once a mining town
like Cerro Gordo had grown up up nearby they would tend to come into town to eat. Many actually lived in the towns and that's because they usually were in the mine for 12 hours a day, and just like today after a hard days of work you say let's just order in, back then they were like eh let's just go to the saloon. Though just because you were going to a saloon or a restaurant to get your food that doesn't mean that it was necessarily much better. When visiting the small mining town of Angels Camp, California in the winter of 1865 Mark Twain wrote of the food at one establishment saying "Beans and dishwater for breakfast..., dishwater and beans for dinner; and both articles warmed over for supper." Again this culinary monotony was usually just because it was hard to get a varied grocery list in many of these towns. Bringing in food took a long time and so anything that could
spoil couldn't be brought in, and that's why many of the foods were canned; canned fruits,
canned meats, canned vegetables, and of course the canned milk like the kind that we're
using in today's recipe. Even many saloons had to rely on these canned ingredients like one that was near a mine in Globe Arizona. "The menu never varied... It consisted of a platter of thin, evil tasting steak cooked until it was like leather. This was passed around the table; bread, coffee, condensed
milk and nearly always sugar, sometimes this was missing. Occasionally boiled rice or stewed, dried fruit. For this we paid nine dollars each, a week." Now even if the steak was evil tasting, at least
it was steak, at least it was fresh and many mining towns did have access to fresh meat. Here
in Cerro Gordo they had cows, and chickens, and pigs, and goats, and they had a lake that was nearby and a river that was nearby where they could get fresh fish and everything, and then there was of course big game hunting so they ate bighorn sheep. Essentially for most miners what you ate came down
to what you had access to that and who was doing the cooking. See not only were many miners Mexican and Chinese and foreign in general, but many of the saloon owners and restaurant owners and the
cooks were Mexican, Chinese, German, Irish, Italian, and so those cuisines were actually very popular
already here in California and throughout the American West. And this very multicultural cuisine can actually be seen in a dinner that took place in the 1880s. It actually took place in New York
but it was made up of a bunch of people who had been here right when the Gold Rush was starting, and so they would get together every year and eat the foods that they used to eat. "The champagne served was a brand from San Francisco, specially procured for the occasion. Under the caption 'To order (if you want it)' were grizzly bear steaks with frijoles, ribs of antelope with tortillas, carne seca with chili colorado, fried salt pork with slapjacks, stewed jackass rabbit with moscal, mule (rump) steak
with hardtack, and mysterious stew a la Chinese." Now exactly what that mysterious stew a la Chinese
was I'm not sure but Chinese food in general was very, very popular amongst the miners. The Americans
would often eat a fairly new dish called chop suey. It was on every menu and then there were also
imported foods from China that the Chinese miners would eat. Brent has found different things from China here in Cerro Gordo and it's just crazy that it's come all this way back in the 1800s and
now it's just sitting out there in the desert. Now perhaps one of the most iconic foreign cuisines
that came to mining here in the US was from the Cornish people. The people of Cornwall in the southwest of England were mining tin and copper as far back as the early Bronze Age so when the silver mines of Colorado and California opened up many a cornishmen came over to put his skills to good use. They were called Cousin Jacks and some of the foods that they brought over had wonderfully whimsical names like kiddley broth, figgyhobbin, and junket and cream. I had to look all those up. Kiddley broth is a sort of onion broth with bread chunks. Figgyhobbin is a pastry stuffed with raisins and junket and cream is a sort of pudding made of curdled milk and nutmeg. But there was one dish that they brought over that I did not have to look up and that's because it is still rather popular in many communities here in the US today and back in jolly old England, and that is the famous Cornish pasty which was basically a hand pie filled with beef, onion, rutabaga, or swede and potato. "Fortunate indeed, is the miner so steeped in connubial bliss as to possess a better half who in her loving care, as a token of her affection, places a pasty or two in The lunchbox of her miner spouse. 'A letter from home,' is what the miners terms such a setup." Unfortunately my better half is not here to make me a pasty so I'm going to just have to stick with my biscuits and gravy so I better make that gravy. So for this you can start with any greasy meat you might have. You can use sausage or bacon but I'm going to use the meat that most miners had access to and
that is salt pork. Now it needs to be rinsed to get some of the salt out as much as you can and then chopped up really really fine, and then put it in a skillet and cook it until most of the fat has melted. Once it's cooked remove it from the pan but leave the grease. Then we're going to sprinkle in some flour. Now how much you use really is kind of based on how thick you want your gravy, but typically it's about the same as the amount of grease. Stir it All in making sure there aren't any lumps, and cook it for just a couple of minutes until it starts to thicken and then add some of that evaporated milk. Now one thing I did find is that if if you use evaporated milk it
has a lower water consistency than regular milk and so it makes the flow mixture kind of seize up but if you just keep whisking it finally turns back into a nice smooth gravy. Then you can go ahead and add some of that pork back in and dish it up on your biscuits. And here we are biscuits, and gravy for an Old West miner. Let's give it a shot. I love biscuits and gravy. You do not need to add more salt to that. You can add a little pepper, but it is plenty salty because of that pork. Now the biscuits did not rise as much as I would have expected especially because I'm at like 8,000 foot elevation- It's Max from Editing and I have been racking my brain trying to figure out why my biscuits didn't rise and as I'm editing I realized that the milk that I put into the actual recipe did not have any baking soda. For some reason, and I can't recall why, I made two bowls of milk, and the one that went in was the one without any baking soda. So just letting you know it wasn't the recipe that screwed up it was the Max that screwed up. I made a mistake and there it is so if you make this recipe just add the baking soda, and it should work out just fine I would think. Anyway luckily they did still taste really good so I'll let that Max tell you about that. -but the flavor is excellent. So are they the best biscuits and gravy I've ever tasted? No. My grandpa's biscuits and gravy are the best I've ever tasted, but if I was a miner out for days at a time on a mountain that would have been a darn good breakfast, and so yeah go ahead and make them or go buy some biscuits and gravy somewhere , one of my favorite dishes and check out Brent Underwood's Channel Ghost Town living for more about the amazing town of Cerro Gordo, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
