Pies

The town of Grass Valley has a substantial Cornish population. The Cornish miners imported for the Empire Mine and several of the others, which operated until 1937 pulling gold out beneath my feet, and has left another $4 billion dollars still down there, at current market price, brought their own cuisine to the area. You can still buy Pasties at a couple local shops and many cafes sell them too. A pastie, not to be confused with a pasty which is a sort of ornamental adult jewelry worn by strippers (not the kind that remove paint), a pastie is a type of pie with the crust folded over and pinched shut. It is sustaining food. You make the crust a bit tougher by briefly kneading it, and wrap it around a filling usually made by a semi-dry stew mixture of diced beef and potatoes, usually with herbs too. The steam from the potatoes cooks the beef and the crust keeps the heat inside.

Cornish wives would rise early, bake pasties for most of an hour in an oven, and then load them and some other things to eat, and a tub of hot tea, into a stacked lunchpail that their mining husband and the older sons, into the mines with them. They'd set down for lunch at some junction, covered in rock dust, smelling explosives and quietly praying that the water pumps don't turn off, and that they don't hit a bad gas pocket that will asphyxiate them all. Mining is dangerous. And it pays really poorly. Gas is more of an issue in coal mining rather than gold mining. Gold tends to be in granite, so the danger is more from flooding and explosions gone wrong. And deafness from the drills. It is a loud business, mining gold. The good old days of rocker arms and pneumonia and laudanum addiction were well past by 1937. It was a modern time of cyanide leaching ponds, hammer mills, Pelton-wheel driven water power, and eventually Gold was extracted, sealed up in a box, and shipped down in a locked box on an armed stagecoach or train, to San Francisco, where the Mint would coin it or store it as bullion bars.

Gold is rare, shiny, and valuable because it reacts to nothing, though it does alloy with Silver, and spontaneously melts in Mercury, which is one of the elements you can sometimes use to find a Gold mine, the hydrothermal kind associated with hot springs. The local gold was found with tin and silver and antimony (similar to tin but different element) and arsenic. Most of the gold and other metals are the last things to react out as underground magma cooled during the formation of the granite depths of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. They tend to stay with the quartz and sulphates and then burst into cracks when the quartz and water do something called Second Boiling, a chemical reaction which tends to be explosive and is currently causing earthquakes under The Geysers as well as Long Valley Caldera, feared by the curious but not going to erupt again. The magma source is cut off so its just cooling into a nice granite down there. No more supervolcano eruptions in Long Valley. Sorry. If you are interested in those, Yellowstone would be your culprit.

I appreciate a pastie, done properly. They are difficult to cool fast enough to avoid food poisoning, which means they really should be eaten fresh, not reheated after freezing. While traditional pasties are meat and potatoes, older varieties could be apples or pears or peaches or raisins. Since the crust is relatively strong, you were after the filling anyway, and it was proper Medieval Warm Period food, you know, that time there's a ton of tapestries and historical records about but the Cult of Global Climate tries to ignore because it makes them look stupid. I'm just glad that these records exist. I especially like the one based on salt cod barrels from the shoals of Iceland. Kept the Vikings busy doing honest work instead of raiding and such, and the English and Scots bought this cod and learned to like it. Same as the sardines caught off the central California coast got canned in Monterey and shipped to Ireland and England for Kippers breakfast in 1900. We fed Great Britain instead of letting them suffer famine. We also overfished. Sardines are a good pie filling too, apparently. If you find yourself with a lot of spare time and some leftover stew, you can make a pie crust and fold in the filling to make a pastie.

Doesn't that look tasty? Better than a burger. Sticks to your ribs. Stays hot inside for hours.