By the way, I'm aware there's varying legends about the origin of the dish that supposedly got its start in Placerville, CA. My question isn't necessarily about this specific legend (although it would certainly be cool if a historian here had insights into its veracity) but more about the veracity of last meal requests and how elaborate they could be in general.
I got impatient waiting for a response so I looked into it myself: fulfilling last meal requests to the letter depended heavily on the local laws and customs, and honoring the request wasn’t normally a matter of law but of tradition. The Hangtown Fry legend you mention wasn’t quite an outlier in terms of how far authorities would go to fulfill a request, as, historically, last meal requests were treated similarly to requests a law-abiding citizen might make on their death bed - namely, very seriously.
There was a definite religious component to it that can be traced back to prominence in medieval Christian Europe. There were parallels between Jesus’s Last Supper and a convict choosing their final meal: a prisoner breaking bread with their executioners is one following the example Jesus set via inviting Judas to the Last Supper. Superstition played a role in ensuring the quality of food during their final meals, where the spirits of those executed might torment the executioners if they received a terrible meal.
But your question sounds more US-focused so I’ll center on America’s approach to such requests before the 21st century. One example includes the last meal requests at Sing Sing in the 1960s: the condemned could ask for both a final dinner and a final supper, which could also include asking for tobacco products like cigarettes and snuff. Murderer Henry Flakes, who was executed in 1960 at Sing Sing, took advantage of both by ordering feasts for both his supper and dinner that included four packs of cigarettes at dinner and four cigars at supper.
The wardens and executioners did their best to fulfill the condemned’s final requests even when it was not quite legal, as we can see with stories of inmates given alcohol during Prohibition. The titular case at this time was for the 1925 execution of Patrick Murphy at Sing Sing, who begged Warden Lewis Lawes for a final drink. The warden did slip him some bourbon (obviously breaking prison rules and the federal law doing so) and, reportedly, “Murphy took the bottle, looked at Lawes (who loathed executions) and died having returned the bottle to Lawes saying, “You look like you need it more than I do, Warden.””
There was a practical aspect to fulfilling these final requests of death row inmates, in that such requests kept the condemned “settled” and more accepting of the fact they were going to die. This extended to the rest of those on death row, whose day of reckoning was yet to come. At Sing Sing it wasn’t uncommon for the soon-to-be-executed to share the spoils with their fellow prisoners: in 1931 Francis ‘Two Gun’ Crowley shared his meal with fellow murderer John Resko, which was upstaged in 1951 when Raymond Fernandez shared it with all the rest of the condemned. Such generosity was considered a sort of parting gift to the rest, a final hurrah before being marched out to the grave. Denying a prisoner their final meal means that much more upset before, during, and after the execution, as the rest of death row wouldn’t look kindly on such a refusal.
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