Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/141

 remnants of a breakfast. At supper the scuffle around the kitchen door was equally disastrous. “Sometimes the spoons,” wrote Judge Wingate of the class of 1759, “were the only tangible evidence of the meal remaining.” After 1764, when the second Harvard Hall was built, the annoyance was mitigated to the extent of serving breakfast in hall; and in 1806, after a long and stormy agitation by the students, supper also was grudgingly restored to its old location there.

The preceding paragraphs have dealt chiefly with the buttery and the hall, in their various aspects, as gathered from the early chroniclers. But of all the component parts of the system, the greatest interest seems to have been excited by the kitchen. In the early days, when the domestic economy of a single family formed the only comparison, the regular cooking and serving of meals for more than a dozen persons was in itself a novelty, while the cumbrous apparatus of open woodfires, cranes and hangers, pots and kettles, brick ovens, turnspits, jacks, trivets, pumps, buckets, coppers, and so forth, took up a vast amount of room and produced a far more imposing effect than the neat and compact utensils made possible by modern methods of heating, plumbing, refrigeration, and sewage.

Moreover, the college kitchen was a real asset to the neighborhood, the largest and most complete catering