Livingston, a waitress at the Buttercup for more than 30 years, hates the smell of the canned oysters. When a Times reporter ordered the dish on a recent morning, waitress Karlyn Livingston raised an eyebrow and asked, “You know it has oysters, right?” “Why anybody would order it, I don’t know.”Ĭooks there, he said, “try to make it palatable” by adding onions and jack cheese amid the smoked bacon and canned oysters. And there are even a few people who swear it’s delicious and keep coming back for it. In the 33 years Huston has owned the Buttercup, he’s never tried the Hangtown Fry. Huston, who loves California history, said the dish has drawn documentarians and camera crews from television food and history channels to the Buttercup Pantry, a cozy restaurant filled with wooden booths and antiques. Like all the local legends, the Hangtown Fry endures. (Hailey Branson-Potts / Los Angeles Times ) The stump of a tree used for hangings is in the building’s basement. 141 - called the Hangman’s Tree Historic Spot. These days, a mannequin wearing suspenders and a red handkerchief swings from a noose outside an old Main Street building - California Historic Landmark No. One of the suspects was captured and hanged. Staples, the story has it, died in a shootout with the bandits. There’s a plaque on Main Street dedicated to Joseph Staples, an El Dorado County deputy sheriff who in 1864 chased a group of outlaws who robbed two stagecoaches at gunpoint, saying they were trying to raise money for the Confederacy. It quickly became known as Hangtown because so many murderers and robbers were hanged there. The bustling Mother Lode town was initially called Dry Diggins because miners had to haul dry soil down to running water to separate the gold. In present-day Placerville, rugged Old West legends abound. “It was probably handed down,” she said of the tale. Thompson said the wealthy-prospector story is the most widely accepted. Another says it was made by a prospector trying to cook in the dark. Another version has it that the dish was a last meal for a miner who was sentenced to hang. Like most old stories around here, there are a few different tellings of how the Hangtown Fry came to be. “They took those ingredients, made a big, ol’ dish and scrambled them together,” Huston said.
The bacon was shipped in from Europe, Huston said. The oysters, also from the Bay Area, had to be packed in ice, which was a luxury in an era before refrigerators. The eggs were seagull eggs from the Farallon Islands off San Francisco that had to be carefully wrapped during the long trek from the coast. “You have to understand how hard it was to make this dish,” Huston said. The cook told him the priciest items on the menu were eggs, bacon and oysters.
He flung his gold onto the bar and demanded the “finest and most expensive” dinner in the house. The legend of the Hangtown Fry, which is now served in places all along the Pacific Coast, goes something like this: In 1849, or thereabouts, a prospector staggered into the El Dorado Saloon in Old Hangtown’s Cary House Hotel, saying he’d struck it rich, said Joyce Thompson, a longtime volunteer researcher at the El Dorado County Historical Museum.
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