1853
In late 1852, the clipper Golden Eagle embarked on her maiden voyage from Boston to California.1 While rounding Cape Horn during the typically calm Antarctic summer, the ship encountered rough seas that damaged her bow, necessitating a month of repairs in Rio before continuing. By the time she reached the Golden Gate in the spring of 1853, she sailed past the newly built lighthouse on Alcatraz Island, still awaiting its revolving lantern from France. Finally, the great clipper docked in a bustling multinational city of 40,000 inhabitants, all seeking their fortunes.
Among the handful of passengers who disembarked at San Francisco that day was a man named Isaac Pear. During his year-long stay, Pear included at least three menus in letters he sent to relatives back home. The detailed contents of these menus illustrate the abundance of food supplied by a well-established supply chain at the time. Despite a decline in prices from their peak four years earlier, the cost of food remained steep, especially for local products which commanded the highest premiums.
 |
| Long Wharf, ca. 1853 |
The menus originated from three restaurants located on "Long Wharf," which was situated on Commercial Street right next to the expansive Central Wharf.3 Ulysses S. Grant, in his Memoirs, depicted daily life at this wharf in 1852 when, at thirty years old, he passed through the city as a lieutenant:
“San Francisco at that day was a lively place. Gold…was at its height. Steamers plied daily between San Francisco and both Stockton and Sacramento. Passengers and gold from the southern mines came by the Stockton boat; from the northern mines by Sacramento. Long Wharf—there was but one wharf in San Francisco in 1852—was alive with people crowding to meet the miners as they came down to sell their ‘dust’ and to ‘have a time.’ Of these some were runners for hotels, boarding houses or restaurants; others belonged to a class of impecunious adventurers, of good manners and good presence, who were ever on the alert to make the acquaintance of people with some ready means, in the hope of being asked to take a meal at a restaurant.”4
During the following year, when Grant (now a Captain) passed through San Francisco again, he noted significant changes: “There had been but one wharf in front of the city in 1852–Long Wharf. In 1853 the town had grown out into the bay beyond what was the end of this wharf when I first saw it. Streets and houses had been built out on piles where the year before the largest vessels visiting the port lay at anchor or tied to the wharf…San Francisco presented the same general appearance as the year before; that is, eating, drinking and gambling houses were conspicuous for their number and publicity. They were on the first floor, with doors wide open. At all hours of the day and night in walking the streets, the eye was regaled, on every block near the water front, by the sight of players at faro.”5
There was no quick means of reaching California before the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869. Crossing the country by wagon took five to six months, and voyages by ship around the Horn spanned even longer, covering 16,000 nautical miles. Although some travelers, such as prospectors, opted for the quicker route across the Isthmus of Panama, most supplies still had to be transported by sea. Clippers, renowned as the fastest sailing ships of their time, typically completed the journey in under three and a half months. Originally designed for transporting high-value cargo like tea and spices from China, these "greyhounds of the sea" were not initially intended for bulk shipments. Nevertheless, everyday goods such as flour, rice, butter, and hams commanded exorbitant prices in San Francisco. Notably, the cost of eggs became a national symbol of the high cost of living in the West.6
During the height of the Gold Rush, a four-month-old egg transported from Boston cost 25 cents, equivalent to the price of an entire meal at a comparable restaurant on the East Coast. Local foods in California were even more expensive; for instance, a "fresh California egg" was priced at $1.00 on this menu from December 1849, archived in the San Francisco Public Library. For an astonishing $3.00, one could indulge in a roasted long-billed curlew, a shorebird abundant in the winter along California's coastal mudflats. These birds were hunted in large numbers at nearby Candlestick Point, named after the distinctive shape of their bills which resembled candlesticks.
The owners of the Swiss Republic hailed from the Alpine canton of Ticino in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Another fellow countryman, Cyrus Delmonico, nephew of the renowned restaurateurs in New York, also launched an eatery in San Francisco during this period. The discovery of gold lured thousands of Ticinesi like Delmonico, Scalmanini, and Frapoli to California, forming one of the largest Italian Swiss communities in the world.
When M. L. Winn arrived in 1849, he began making candy and selling it on the streets, proclaiming: “Here is your California candy! It has neither come 'round the Horn nor across the Isthmus, but is made in your city…”7 Winn went on to establish a temperance restaurant called the Fountain Head on Long Wharf, followed by the “Branch” located at the corner of Montgomery and Washington streets, and finally the “Extension” on Clay Street. Despite reports of thriving business, friends suggested he could increase profits by selling alcohol. However, Winn remained steadfast in his refusal to serve intoxicating beverages.8
The temperance theme is reflected on the dinner menu below by the cartoon comparing a well-dressed gentleman at the Fountain Head to a disheveled man entering a bar labeled “Not Winn’s.” The antebellum spirit of this menu is also conveyed by the puddings named after “Aunt Sally” and “Cousin Jane.” Buckwheat pancakes are served with Winn’s Golden Syrup, a product he also sold in retail. Interestingly, three eggs from Boston cost 37 cents, half the price from four years earlier. While prices had decreased, everything remained relatively expensive. In his Memoirs, Grant recalled that “the prices for all kinds of supplies were so high on the Pacific coast from 1849 until at least 1853—that it would have been impossible for officers of the army to exist upon their pay…” In fact, Grant’s future commander, William Tecumseh Sherman, resigned his captaincy in 1853 to become a bank manager in San Francisco. Despite high prices, residents of San Francisco generally earned enough to dine out frequently, leading to bustling restaurants. Winn claimed he sold 125 dozen eggs daily that year.
Lower prices necessitated smaller units of currency. However, before the discovery of gold, the federal Mint did not have enough precious metal, leading to the widespread use of foreign coins across the country. On à la carte menus of the era, increments such as 12- and 12½-cents reflected the use of the Spanish real, valued at an eighth of a dollar. Known as a “bit” in the West, the real was referred to as a “ninepence” in New England, a “shilling” in New York, and a “levy” in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Other circulating coins included Russian kopecks, Dutch six-dollar pieces, and specie from France, England, Mexico, and South American republics. (A branch of the Mint was established in San Francisco in 1854, and three years later, the U.S. government prohibited the use of all foreign coins.)
Dubbed the “Ice Cream Maker Plenipotentiary,” Winn could produce enough ice cream for 1,500 servings per day. However, on Saturday, May 16 (the date noted on the menu above), demand exceeded supply—ice cream is crossed out, along with strawberries, green gooseberry pie, and fresh peaches with cream. Winn’s Branch was recognized as a ladies' ice cream saloon, though its social environment differed from similar venues in other American cities.
During the Gold Rush, women constituted a small minority of the population, prompting an influx of prostitutes from around the globe—including France, Germany, Australia, Mexico, China, and various parts of the United States. Essentially, they hailed from the same regions as other fortune seekers.10 As San Francisco rapidly evolved into a multinational city predominantly inhabited by bachelors in their twenties and thirties, no single set of moral standards prevailed in the early years.11 Women of easy virtue openly mingled with men across all societal strata, with some even rising to positions of influence in upper echelons of society until the city's permissive attitudes began to shift around this time.
The menu from Alden’s Epicurean Retreat was produced by the Excelsior Print Company, located next to the Niantic Hotel, which had been constructed within a beached whaling vessel.12,13 Alongside fish and game dishes sourced from the West, such as salmon, venison, and elk steaks, the menu also features three Boston eggs priced at 37 cents, mirroring Winn’s competitive pricing in a city brimming with saloons, restaurants, and hotels.
Alden’s menu also features a California egg for 25 cents, now only twice the price of a Boston egg. Although many farms had been established in the area by 1853, the high price of local eggs indicates that they were still relatively scarce.14 It would be another twenty years before the chicken industry got rolling in Petaluma, eventually becoming known as the “Egg Capital of the World.”
While the California eggs on these menus were presumably laid by chickens, the high prices attracted another type of fresh eggs to local markets. These eggs were two to three times larger with fiery red yolks, sourced from speckled eggs of the common murre, a seabird nesting on the rocky cliffs of the Farallon Islands, located 27 miles west of the Golden Gate. By 1853, so-called “eggers” had harvested millions of eggs from the densely populated colonies on these fertile islands. At its peak, the lucrative trade in murre eggs continued into the 1890s. Despite conservation efforts over the past century, the population of these seabirds has yet to fully recover.
Notes
1. Golden Eagle was launched at Medford, Massachusetts on 9 November 1852. Featuring a figurehead of a gilded eagle on the wing, the ship was an extreme clipper with a displacement of 1121 tons, measuring 192 x 36 x 22 feet (length x beam x depth of hold). The ship made eight voyages from the East Coast around the Horn to San Francisco; the first out of Boston, the others from New York. On 21 February 1863, during the homeward leg of the last of these voyages, she was attacked and burned by the Confederate commerce raider C.S.S. Alabama.
2. A U. S. Coast Survey map shows that a four-block section of Commercial Street, situated closest to the Central Wharf, was named Wharf Street in 1853, which is reflected by the “Long Wharf” addresses on two of these menus. Of the sixty-six restaurants listed in LeCount & Strong’s San Francisco City Directory for the Year 1854, sixteen are shown as being on Commercial Street. Beginning with those closest to the Central Wharf, they included the Swiss Republic (19), Knickerbocker (46), Rail Road Coffee and Tea Rooms (48), Alden’s Epicurean Retreat (74-76, incorrectly listed as 174-176), Winn’s Fountain Head (78-80), Eastern (84), Louisiana (99), Miners (129), Clayton’s (141), National (147), Clayton Saloon (148), Barnum’s (151-153), Café Washington (163), Terrapin Lunch (166-168), A La Croix Rouge (170), and Restaurant de la Porte, “near Kearny.”
3. First built in 1849 in the tidal flats of Yerba Buena Cove, the Central Wharf later became known as Long Wharf, and eventually as the Commercial Street Wharf. By 1853, the huge forest of masts from an abandoned fleet of vessels was used to the fill in the cove, and the wharf was extended into the Bay.
4. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Chapter XIV, 1885.
5. Grant returned to San Francisco again in 1854, after resigning his captaincy at Fort Humboldt. He stayed at the What Cheer House, a temperance hotel at Leidesdorff and Sacramento streets, just around the corner from these restaurants.
6. Andrew Beahrs, "Slush on the Mizzentops, Butter in the Hold," Gastronomica, Winter 2012, p. 37-45.
7. Frank Soulé, The annals of San Francisco; containing a summary of the history of ... California, New York, 1855.
“San Francisco at that day was a lively place. Gold…was at its height. Steamers plied daily between San Francisco and both Stockton and Sacramento. Passengers and gold from the southern mines came by the Stockton boat; from the northern mines by Sacramento. Long Wharf—there was but one wharf in San Francisco in 1852—was alive with people crowding to meet the miners as they came down to sell their ‘dust’ and to ‘have a time.’ Of these some were runners for hotels, boarding houses or restaurants; others belonged to a class of impecunious adventurers, of good manners and good presence, who were ever on the alert to make the acquaintance of people with some ready means, in the hope of being asked to take a meal at a restaurant.”4
 |
| San Francisco, 1853 |
During the following year, when Grant (now a Captain) passed through San Francisco again, he noted significant changes: “There had been but one wharf in front of the city in 1852–Long Wharf. In 1853 the town had grown out into the bay beyond what was the end of this wharf when I first saw it. Streets and houses had been built out on piles where the year before the largest vessels visiting the port lay at anchor or tied to the wharf…San Francisco presented the same general appearance as the year before; that is, eating, drinking and gambling houses were conspicuous for their number and publicity. They were on the first floor, with doors wide open. At all hours of the day and night in walking the streets, the eye was regaled, on every block near the water front, by the sight of players at faro.”5
There was no quick means of reaching California before the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869. Crossing the country by wagon took five to six months, and voyages by ship around the Horn spanned even longer, covering 16,000 nautical miles. Although some travelers, such as prospectors, opted for the quicker route across the Isthmus of Panama, most supplies still had to be transported by sea. Clippers, renowned as the fastest sailing ships of their time, typically completed the journey in under three and a half months. Originally designed for transporting high-value cargo like tea and spices from China, these "greyhounds of the sea" were not initially intended for bulk shipments. Nevertheless, everyday goods such as flour, rice, butter, and hams commanded exorbitant prices in San Francisco. Notably, the cost of eggs became a national symbol of the high cost of living in the West.6
During the height of the Gold Rush, a four-month-old egg transported from Boston cost 25 cents, equivalent to the price of an entire meal at a comparable restaurant on the East Coast. Local foods in California were even more expensive; for instance, a "fresh California egg" was priced at $1.00 on this menu from December 1849, archived in the San Francisco Public Library. For an astonishing $3.00, one could indulge in a roasted long-billed curlew, a shorebird abundant in the winter along California's coastal mudflats. These birds were hunted in large numbers at nearby Candlestick Point, named after the distinctive shape of their bills which resembled candlesticks.
Adjusting for inflation, one dollar in 1849 is equivalent to approximately $28.00 today. Another way to contextualize the cost of food is by comparing it to the price of gold at the time, which was $19 an ounce.
Forty-niners Carlo Scalmanini and Baptiste Frapoli initially ventured to the gold fields upon arrival but soon returned to San Francisco to establish the Swiss Republic Restaurant at 19 Long Wharf. Many eateries near the landing also offered lodging, as evidenced by the rates for room and board listed on this table d’hôte menu.
Forty-niners Carlo Scalmanini and Baptiste Frapoli initially ventured to the gold fields upon arrival but soon returned to San Francisco to establish the Swiss Republic Restaurant at 19 Long Wharf. Many eateries near the landing also offered lodging, as evidenced by the rates for room and board listed on this table d’hôte menu.
The owners of the Swiss Republic hailed from the Alpine canton of Ticino in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Another fellow countryman, Cyrus Delmonico, nephew of the renowned restaurateurs in New York, also launched an eatery in San Francisco during this period. The discovery of gold lured thousands of Ticinesi like Delmonico, Scalmanini, and Frapoli to California, forming one of the largest Italian Swiss communities in the world.
When M. L. Winn arrived in 1849, he began making candy and selling it on the streets, proclaiming: “Here is your California candy! It has neither come 'round the Horn nor across the Isthmus, but is made in your city…”7 Winn went on to establish a temperance restaurant called the Fountain Head on Long Wharf, followed by the “Branch” located at the corner of Montgomery and Washington streets, and finally the “Extension” on Clay Street. Despite reports of thriving business, friends suggested he could increase profits by selling alcohol. However, Winn remained steadfast in his refusal to serve intoxicating beverages.8
The temperance theme is reflected on the dinner menu below by the cartoon comparing a well-dressed gentleman at the Fountain Head to a disheveled man entering a bar labeled “Not Winn’s.” The antebellum spirit of this menu is also conveyed by the puddings named after “Aunt Sally” and “Cousin Jane.” Buckwheat pancakes are served with Winn’s Golden Syrup, a product he also sold in retail. Interestingly, three eggs from Boston cost 37 cents, half the price from four years earlier. While prices had decreased, everything remained relatively expensive. In his Memoirs, Grant recalled that “the prices for all kinds of supplies were so high on the Pacific coast from 1849 until at least 1853—that it would have been impossible for officers of the army to exist upon their pay…” In fact, Grant’s future commander, William Tecumseh Sherman, resigned his captaincy in 1853 to become a bank manager in San Francisco. Despite high prices, residents of San Francisco generally earned enough to dine out frequently, leading to bustling restaurants. Winn claimed he sold 125 dozen eggs daily that year.
Lower prices necessitated smaller units of currency. However, before the discovery of gold, the federal Mint did not have enough precious metal, leading to the widespread use of foreign coins across the country. On à la carte menus of the era, increments such as 12- and 12½-cents reflected the use of the Spanish real, valued at an eighth of a dollar. Known as a “bit” in the West, the real was referred to as a “ninepence” in New England, a “shilling” in New York, and a “levy” in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Other circulating coins included Russian kopecks, Dutch six-dollar pieces, and specie from France, England, Mexico, and South American republics. (A branch of the Mint was established in San Francisco in 1854, and three years later, the U.S. government prohibited the use of all foreign coins.)
 |
| Winn's Branch, ca. 1855 |
Dubbed the “Ice Cream Maker Plenipotentiary,” Winn could produce enough ice cream for 1,500 servings per day. However, on Saturday, May 16 (the date noted on the menu above), demand exceeded supply—ice cream is crossed out, along with strawberries, green gooseberry pie, and fresh peaches with cream. Winn’s Branch was recognized as a ladies' ice cream saloon, though its social environment differed from similar venues in other American cities.
During the Gold Rush, women constituted a small minority of the population, prompting an influx of prostitutes from around the globe—including France, Germany, Australia, Mexico, China, and various parts of the United States. Essentially, they hailed from the same regions as other fortune seekers.10 As San Francisco rapidly evolved into a multinational city predominantly inhabited by bachelors in their twenties and thirties, no single set of moral standards prevailed in the early years.11 Women of easy virtue openly mingled with men across all societal strata, with some even rising to positions of influence in upper echelons of society until the city's permissive attitudes began to shift around this time.
 |
| Niantic Hotel, ca. 1850 |
The menu from Alden’s Epicurean Retreat was produced by the Excelsior Print Company, located next to the Niantic Hotel, which had been constructed within a beached whaling vessel.12,13 Alongside fish and game dishes sourced from the West, such as salmon, venison, and elk steaks, the menu also features three Boston eggs priced at 37 cents, mirroring Winn’s competitive pricing in a city brimming with saloons, restaurants, and hotels.
Alden’s menu also features a California egg for 25 cents, now only twice the price of a Boston egg. Although many farms had been established in the area by 1853, the high price of local eggs indicates that they were still relatively scarce.14 It would be another twenty years before the chicken industry got rolling in Petaluma, eventually becoming known as the “Egg Capital of the World.”
While the California eggs on these menus were presumably laid by chickens, the high prices attracted another type of fresh eggs to local markets. These eggs were two to three times larger with fiery red yolks, sourced from speckled eggs of the common murre, a seabird nesting on the rocky cliffs of the Farallon Islands, located 27 miles west of the Golden Gate. By 1853, so-called “eggers” had harvested millions of eggs from the densely populated colonies on these fertile islands. At its peak, the lucrative trade in murre eggs continued into the 1890s. Despite conservation efforts over the past century, the population of these seabirds has yet to fully recover.
Notes
1. Golden Eagle was launched at Medford, Massachusetts on 9 November 1852. Featuring a figurehead of a gilded eagle on the wing, the ship was an extreme clipper with a displacement of 1121 tons, measuring 192 x 36 x 22 feet (length x beam x depth of hold). The ship made eight voyages from the East Coast around the Horn to San Francisco; the first out of Boston, the others from New York. On 21 February 1863, during the homeward leg of the last of these voyages, she was attacked and burned by the Confederate commerce raider C.S.S. Alabama.
2. A U. S. Coast Survey map shows that a four-block section of Commercial Street, situated closest to the Central Wharf, was named Wharf Street in 1853, which is reflected by the “Long Wharf” addresses on two of these menus. Of the sixty-six restaurants listed in LeCount & Strong’s San Francisco City Directory for the Year 1854, sixteen are shown as being on Commercial Street. Beginning with those closest to the Central Wharf, they included the Swiss Republic (19), Knickerbocker (46), Rail Road Coffee and Tea Rooms (48), Alden’s Epicurean Retreat (74-76, incorrectly listed as 174-176), Winn’s Fountain Head (78-80), Eastern (84), Louisiana (99), Miners (129), Clayton’s (141), National (147), Clayton Saloon (148), Barnum’s (151-153), Café Washington (163), Terrapin Lunch (166-168), A La Croix Rouge (170), and Restaurant de la Porte, “near Kearny.”
3. First built in 1849 in the tidal flats of Yerba Buena Cove, the Central Wharf later became known as Long Wharf, and eventually as the Commercial Street Wharf. By 1853, the huge forest of masts from an abandoned fleet of vessels was used to the fill in the cove, and the wharf was extended into the Bay.
4. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Chapter XIV, 1885.
5. Grant returned to San Francisco again in 1854, after resigning his captaincy at Fort Humboldt. He stayed at the What Cheer House, a temperance hotel at Leidesdorff and Sacramento streets, just around the corner from these restaurants.
6. Andrew Beahrs, "Slush on the Mizzentops, Butter in the Hold," Gastronomica, Winter 2012, p. 37-45.
7. Frank Soulé, The annals of San Francisco; containing a summary of the history of ... California, New York, 1855.
8. The temperance movement gained national momentum in 1851 when Maine outlawed the sale and consumption of alcohol, followed by eleven other states and territories passing similar laws. This movement, both a social and political force, found resonance even in hard-drinking towns like San Francisco.
9. Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840, 2010.
10. Mindy M. Krazmien, Gold-Rush Era Prostitutes, foundsf.org
11. In the first year or two, men used euphemistic names, such as “ladies in full bloom,” to indicate a prostitute. By 1853, more derogatory terms like Cyprian, harlot, and whore had passed into common usage (Barnhart 1986). Caroline Danielson, Women in Early San Francisco, beta.shapingsf-wiki.org
12. Alden’s Epicurean Retreat also operated a Branch at 81 Sansome Street. By the 1870s, restaurateur Solomon E. Alden was listed in the city directory as a bank director and farmer, living on a 612-acre estate comprising much of the Temescal area of Alameda County.
13. After carrying 248 gold-seekers from Panama to San Francisco, the whaling vessel Niantic was beached near the corner of Clay and Sansome Streets in 1849, when the shoreline ran along Montgomery Street. The ship was converted into a hotel, using the hull as a warehouse with doorways on the sides. The fire of 3 May 1851 destroyed all but the submerged hulk, which became the foundation for another Niantic Hotel that stood until 1872.
14. Weekly California Farmer, an agricultural paper, began publication on 16 January 1853.
9. Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840, 2010.
10. Mindy M. Krazmien, Gold-Rush Era Prostitutes, foundsf.org
11. In the first year or two, men used euphemistic names, such as “ladies in full bloom,” to indicate a prostitute. By 1853, more derogatory terms like Cyprian, harlot, and whore had passed into common usage (Barnhart 1986). Caroline Danielson, Women in Early San Francisco, beta.shapingsf-wiki.org
12. Alden’s Epicurean Retreat also operated a Branch at 81 Sansome Street. By the 1870s, restaurateur Solomon E. Alden was listed in the city directory as a bank director and farmer, living on a 612-acre estate comprising much of the Temescal area of Alameda County.
13. After carrying 248 gold-seekers from Panama to San Francisco, the whaling vessel Niantic was beached near the corner of Clay and Sansome Streets in 1849, when the shoreline ran along Montgomery Street. The ship was converted into a hotel, using the hull as a warehouse with doorways on the sides. The fire of 3 May 1851 destroyed all but the submerged hulk, which became the foundation for another Niantic Hotel that stood until 1872.
14. Weekly California Farmer, an agricultural paper, began publication on 16 January 1853.
5 comments:
Henry, Great research on these three prize menus. I love how you used eggs to tie them together.
I am still reeling at the thought of a 4 month old egg... yuk. Those Murre eggs are just beautiful, how horrid that their colonies were decimated. At least then, people didn't really know better. Today we do it knowing that it's wrong but doing it anyway. Makes me sad.
Great stories, as always. I love your menus
Just discovered your blog thanks to 2 Nerdy History Girls' "Breakfast Links" -- and what a delicious find it is!
Thanks for making history not merely accessable but fascinating and entertaining as well.
One might even call it "mouth-watering" -- I'm having the strongest craving for scrambled eggs!
Thanks again.
Thanks for bringing history alive. I knew the Aldens had a farm in Oakland; I didn't know they had a restaurant in San Francisco. I think that makes them one of pioneers in the farm-to-table movement, doesn't it?
Henry--
Thanks to you I was able to take a few names, dates, and details that have turned in to a biography of my great-great-grandfather Solomon Ellsworth Alden, aka "Solomon's epicurean Retreat." One of the stories my mother told was that her family served the first strawberries in San Francisco. I learned of his 600-acre farm in Berkeley, and I'm sure he must have served strawberries at some point. Your blog post (which I shared with the extended family) was a hit, and sent me on an ancestor quest which resulted in this biography. As a writer myself, I always appreciate hearing from others who found something I wrote useful. That's why I wanted to say a big THANK YOU! for reconnecting me with my family history!
Rob Melton
https://www.familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/171730823
Post a Comment