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of African Americans at the time. They range from simple plantation fare such as sweet potato pone and chitterlings to traditional Western dishes like the Hangtown fry of oysters simmered in butter and served with eggs and cream. There are also truly sophisticated ones that may have been served to the San Francisco establishment, like Nasturtium Artifice, in which nasturtium flowers are stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese and cooked Oregon salmon seasoned with marjoram. The latter recipe is interesting, as, if reasonably authentic, it may indicate just how innovative Pleasant’s cooking was. Cream cheese, although mentioned in an English dictionary in 1754 and known in France in the seventeenth century, only came into usage in the United States in the 1870s and would have been an expensive novelty in Pleasant’s day. Until Pleasant’s own recipes are located, we will never know precisely which ingredients and techniques are hers and which are Holdredge’s. The range of recipes in the books is notable, as it reminds us of the culinary divide between the food of the slave cabins of the plantation South and the dishes of the Big House: those that blacks, free and enslaved, fixed for white patrons. As the country moved westward, blacks who had the culinary know-how to prepare and serve the types of elaborate meals desired by the white upper classes found that their fortune lay in catering to the newly affluent.

Barney Ford was just such an individual. The California Gold Rush was also the lure that attracted Ford to the West. Born in Virginia in 1822, he had grown up on a plantation in South Carolina. As a young man, he’d escaped his Southern bondage, most likely with the aid of the Underground Railroad, and made his way to Chicago, where he was taken in by abolitionists. There he married and learned the trade of barber. After the Gold Rush began, he and his wife headed out toward California in 1851. At that time, before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, there were three ways to head from east to west. The overland route was a journey of two thousand miles on trails subject to all manner of privations, including running out of fresh drinking water, and the fear of Indian raids. The length of the journey depended on seasonal weather conditions, and no traveler could estimate how long it would take. The sea route around Cape Horn was not much better, and the uncomfortable voyage could take as much as six months. A shorter sea route involved traversing the malaria-infested Central America rain forest in Panama to await ships to San Francisco on the Pacific coast. The Fords chose the latter route, but when their ship put in at the port of Greytown in Nicaragua, they disembarked and remained, deciding to open up a small hotel to serve others making the same journey. They were successful, and the United States Hotel, as it was called, was noted for its clean rooms and “home cooked American meals.”

The Fords, though, did not remain in Nicaragua. The threat of war there and the discovery of gold in Colorado led them back stateside with a change in destination; they arrived in the area near Denver in 1859, and Barney attempted to make a claim. He was rebuffed because, as an African American, he was not allowed to stake one in his name. He attempted to use a white lawyer, but that too ended in disaster, when the lawyer had him thrown off the mountain he was trying to claim. His claim was then jumped, and all ended in ruin. The Fords began anew; this time, Barney fell back on the trade he’d learned in Chicago, set up a barbershop in downtown Denver, and began to build a clientele. But when the fire of 1863 burned much of Denver to the ground, including Ford’s barbershop, it was back to the drawing board yet again. The fire led to Denver’s 1863 “brick ordinance,” in which all new buildings in the city had to be constructed with brick or stone. It was a challenge, but this time, with a nine-thousand-dollar grant from a local banker who had faith in his abilities, Ford opened his People’s Restaurant on the corner of Sixteenth