Cathleen Allison/Nevada Appeal
Virginia City's getting old. One-hundred-fifty-years old to be exact, but don't let her age fool you. She's still full of spirits and alive with history, and come the first weekend in June she'll prove it.
Although there are events planned throughout the year, June 5-7 is the official sesquicentennial celebration. From one end of the town to the other there will be demonstrations, exhibits and reenactments depicting life as it was in the early days. There will be camps of Union and Confederate soldiers and guided tours of the cemetery. Gunfights and gun shows. Lots of docents in period attire walking the streets and telling it like it was.
The Fourth Ward School with its beautifully restored classrooms, working printing press, and mining exhibits that show where and how the vast wealth of the Comstock was achieved will have free admission on Saturday.
Piper's Opera House, once host to many entertainment legends, is bringing back vaudeville for the weekend with "A Handful of Nickels."
Another thing to watch for is the volunteers that will be selling pasties (pronounced like "nasty"), the little meat pies that were brought over from the Isles by the Cornish miners. Just like champagne and oysters were the culinary badge of opulence for the rich folks, pasties were the staple for the working man. So dear to the "Cousin Jacks" were these little hot pockets that they were sometimes called "letters from home," partly because of their package-like appearance and surely because of their connection to the homeland these men had left for opportunity to the goldfields of California and Nevada.
In doing the exhaustive research that you good readers deserve I was struck by two things about pasties. One was how many references and recipes there were for pasties on the Internet. And two, was how bland and downright boring they were. So bleak that I concluded they were the reason why in the photographs you see of the early miners, no one is smiling.
Then in a conversation with Virginia Nevin, one of our residents whose VC roots go deeper than some of the mines, I learned about her mother's recipe in which a little ketchup and Lea & Perrins is added to the traditional ingredients. It really works. Originally, the crust was made using suet, the fat that surrounds a cow's kidneys. Since this can prove a little difficult to find, we used some lard to get that meaty flavor.
Butter, shortening or your favorite crust recipe will work just as well if you're trying to lay off the lard, and I've even heard of a prepared crust (store bought) being used in a pinch.
Don't use carrots. Everyone will know that you're not Cornish.
By the way, the inaugural dinners for our new banquet room will be June 5 and 6. Seating is limited so please call for reservations. In keeping with the sesquicentennial theme and the room's boarding house heritage, it will be a menu of hearty soup, pot roast and potatoes, homemade bread and Ardi's Comstock apple cobbler. And of course, pasty appetizers. All served boarding house style for $18.59. Get it?
So get a room, or drive up for the day and be a part of history. An event like this only comes around every 150 years.
Go to visitvirginiacity
NV.com for specifics.
- Brian Shaw and his wife Ardie own the Cafe del Rio, 394 S. C Street in Virginia City.