Janet's gold-panning story in the paper today got me thinking about gold rush food history.

Really, the West Coast's restaurant boom started when Sam Brannan paraded his vial of gold dust down Montgomery Street in San Francisco, yelling “Gold! Gold! Gold on the American River!” With that he ignited the 1849 gold rush, and San Francisco restaurants have never been the same.

The vicissitudes of supply and demand made rustling up some vittles 150 years ago anything but a cakewalk. Vegetables in early San Francisco were luxuries that only the very rich could afford—apples up to $5 each. Most of those miners went without, risking scurvy and other ailments. Want bread with your meal? That’s $1 a slice, $2 if it was buttered.

Bad planning yielded a glut of some staples—you couldn’t give slab bacon away—and a dire lack of others. Some 49ers were known to have paid up to $100 for a glass of water. And because the miners were largely rough-and-tumble men who didn’t know a bain marie from a melon baller, the womanly art of cooking took on unforeseen luster, creating a little cult of highly-paid celebrity chefs. Hey, that doesn’t sound too different from today.

In 1881, the San Francisco city directory lists 233,959 residents, 428 restaurants, 342 oyster saloons, 90 coffee saloons, and some 1400 bars. That means roughly one eating or drinking establishment per every 100 people. Not bad.

Just what were all those early settlers tucking into at great expense? That would be “Hangtown fry," a sinful amalgam of scrambled eggs, bacon and oysters. One probably apocryphal account attributes its origin to a prospector who had just struck pay dirt and wanted to celebrate with the most costly meal that could be whipped up in camp. Another story gives the honors to a man on death row who dreamed up this final-meal request (oysters were so prized that the oyster beds of San Francisco were depleted by 1851) as a means of postponing his execution a bit.

Pretty luxurious stuff, huh? What are some other great more-is-more, pull-out-all-the-stops dishes?