The Silver Omelet.
Doubtless you should not be blamed for a sniff of incredulity when I come to mention the size of it, though you certainly have not made as many omelets as I did in the years of keeping house on the frontier “all by my lonesome,” and though you probably could not turn one now by flapping it to within six inches of the ceiling and catching it, t’other side up, in the frying pan, as every fit frontiersman should. But blink as you will, it is a solemn truth that we are now sitting down to an omelet two feet and a half thick and a little matter of one hundred and ten feet across! And worth more than all the food your whole household could eat in a generation.
The worst of it was that the chef was away. Don Ygnacio, who had served up these gigantic dishes for thirty years, and had the knack of them, was to-day in Dolores; and in charge of the range was a fuzzy-faced lad of eighteen who had never turned a Guanajuato omelet in his life.
Guanajuato, you must know, is one of the oldest and richest silver-mining districts in the world. Founded over three hundred and fifty years ago, this picturesque Mexican city has produced more than a billion dollars in bullion, and not tired yet. In 1527 a Spanish miner invented in Mexico the cheapest and simplest method yet known for reducing silver ores—the so called “patio process”—by which the great bulk of the silver of Mexico and Peru has been extracted for so many centuries. To this day the haciendas for patio reduction are among the most interesting features of the great silver camps of Spanish America. Each hacienda is a little walled city—with its strong ramparts, and corner towers loop-holed for muskets; its huge sheds for the primitive ore-grinding; its pleasant offices and home for the administrador; its quarters for employes; its stables for hundreds of mules; and its enormous stone skillets wherein the hugest omelets in the world are “cooked.”
Torta in Spanish America is the usual word for omelet. It is literally a “cake,” and “of eggs” is implied. But the miners use it specifically for the omelet of wet-ground ore seasoned with the necessary chemicals to assemble the silver. In looks it is simply a stupendous mud pie.
In the hacienda of the Cypresses one of these omelets was even now cooking. Patient burro caravans had packed down from the wonderful old bonanza mine of the Valenciana enough cargas of that broken gray rock to make forty-six “heaps” of 3200 pounds each. The ore had been fed to the great trundling molina, whose ponderous, upright, iron-bound wheel grudgingly followed the straining mules round and round its pivot, crunching the rock finer and finer, till the particles sifted through the screen to the bins below. Thence it had been shoveled into the wet-grinding arrastras—thirty big stone tubs, around which the mules circled with their “whims,” dragging granite blocks which scrubbed the wet gravel into fine paste. Then the mud went to the great cajete (tank), where the surplus water was “wept away,” as they say; and finally to the stone-walled, stone-paved patio, to become a torta.
Almost anyone with eyes could crush rock, dry or wet; but when it came to sampling that precious mud, deciding precisely how much silver it carried to the ton and how refractory it was, and therefore just how much salt and just how much mercury must be put in for seasoning, why, then was no time for a greenhorn. Fifty thousand dollars is no joke, any way you look at it; and when you come to hunting for $50,000 by the invisible atom in a hundred and fifty tons of mud, it is as serious as anything well can be.