Dr. Richard Stein came to Palmerton on May 14 and brought his food with him from the scrambled eggs, bacon and toast to magnificent desserts. When members of the Palmerton Area Historical Society entered the meeting room in the library, the table was spread with complete meals. One person asked what the food was for, not realizing it was mineral and inedible.

The plates are onyx. Stein said he wants to buy saucers but has not been able to find any.He was born in Palmerton, moved to Aquashicola, and then to Fireline. He attended Penn State, but his hobby of rock collecting came late. After college and before he looked for a job he traveled to Washington State and back again. When he got to Colorado he said all people wanted to talk about was rocks. At Dinosaur Park there was a lot of rose quartz. He still has some of it."We'll run down the menu, (each person had been given one) and talk about some of the foods," Stein said.Since he sets a formal table, there were napkin rings. They are clay concretions found on the bank of a stream - meaning clay ingredients bonded around something like a root. The root rotted and the ring remained."It's the process and not the object that is interesting," he said.Sulfur is a rare mineral that will melt. Get it at the right moment just when it begins to melt, stir it and you have scrambled eggs. Let it melt too long and you have the smell associated with sulfur. If you prefer a soft-boiled egg it will be made of alabaster. Finding one that hadn't been dyed was hard to do. In nature they are always clean and white.The bacon is banded agate from Mexico. Toast is feldspar which came from Ontario, but Stein said it can be found all over the United States. It is just the right color for toast.Cornflakes are flakes of feldspar - the nice thing about feldspar is that it flakes easily. The blueberries in the cereal came from Moab, Utah. They are azurite and are the only mineral Stein ever saw that comes in little berries.The prunes, known as Apache Tears, is natural glass - semi-volcanic embedded in a soft material.The ice cubes in the wine glasses are Iceland spar calcite cut to shape."The whole idea was started by someone else in the mineral club. I got her collection," said Stein.Brides' biscuits are pieces of lava and the salad is green talc, which, if ground, will form talcum powder.The carrots have concentric circles in the rock but it is uncommon and has been dyed. It comes from small stalactites and it is now against the law to go into caves and break the stalactites. However, at a road-work site small caves were cut and the stalactites were uncovered and found on the road.He was telling a woman he needed ham for dinner. She pointed him to a rock in her driveway. A diamond saw sliced it and "it is perfect." The sweet potatoes are from Missouri. They are a natural red or orange color but in that area the color can scrub off.Cucumbers are feldspar core samples which are taken from a drill bit to a lab to be analysed. They need to be colored green around the white core."Sometimes it takes imagination," said Stein.The escargot of a fish menu is fossil snails collected in limestone quarries. Stein had put them in the garage and forgot about them until he realized they would fit into a seafood meal. The salmon (gypsum) was found on a Nova Scotia seashore. The beets are garnets from Canada. He has only a few peas (epidote) because it is difficult to find the right color. Red potatoes are fieldstone found in a stream.Meatloaf was found near Ajo, Ariz., in the desert on an Indian reservation where permission was needed. It is basalt. Ground garnets were used for wine. Commercially, garnets are used for a superior form of sandpaper. One percent of garnets are gem quality. An unsliced carrot was carved from onyx.Desserts looked like rice pudding or tapioca but was actually sand with raisins. The raisins were iron ore pellets from Michigan. He was allowed to tour a mining operation. Grapes are jade - Stein said he hasn't seen much good jade outside China.Ice cream sandwiches were made from hematite cookies filled with quartz ice cream. A birthday cake is calcite with the icing layers naturally colored. A dip of gymsum ice cream fills a beryl crystal cone."One thing that amuses me is the candy box. People keep saying it is a box of chocolates but there are only three in the box," Stein said.He said many of the collecting places are now roads or houses. A good place for fluorescent stone in New Jersey is now houses. He said collecting at Lehigh Tannery is forbidden - that he got there just in time to find quartz crystals. The Tannery is now part of Lehigh Gorge State Park.