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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
As a result, malnutrition and scurvy were constant companions.Flour was 50¢ a pound the equivalent of $15 a pound in today’s dollars. The same applied to just about any other food but in some ways it didn’t matter. Most of the prospectors were men and few of them knew how to cook anyway. It was a time when women did all of the cooking and there were few women scouring the creeks and hills looking for gold. A popular food with many of the 49ers was a bread made from a wet, fermenting mass of yeast called a sourdough starter. Sourdough bread was a result and it was a staple that many of the prospectors managed to make and bake usually in a cast iron Dutch oven or simply fried in a pan to make what is commonly known as Bannock bread. Bannock bread over the coals (Photo by Steve Nubie)Any sourdough starter was highly prized and kept alive and growing in a small crock. The Boudin bakery in San Francisco is famous for their sourdough bread and the original starter was actually saved from the bakery during the earthquake of 1906 by one of the bakers. The bread made to this day at Boudin is from the same starter used in 1849 and has literally given rise to every loaf of Boudin sourdough bread ever baked.The general lack of cooking skills led many miners to find food in local restaurants that started to pop up with greater frequency. It
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