Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/167

 denominated slum, and founded upon “the remains of yesterday’s boiled salt beef and potatoes, hashed up, and indurated in a frying-pan—of itself enough to have produced any amount of dyspepsia.”

Supper was such an unconsidered trifle that for a long time its actual substance does not seem to have been mentioned at all. It was literally “nothing to speak of.” Apparently it comprised only one dish, probably—for the first hundred years or so—bread and milk, and very little of that. In the middle of the eighteenth century the unexpected luxury of pastry was substituted; and Dr. Holyoke of the class of 1746 says, “evening Commons were a pye.” In 1750 the Corporation allowed the additional attraction of half a pint of beer, but took good care to keep down the food ration by ordering “that the supper messes be but of four parts, though the dinner messes be of six.’ In the Laws of 1765 the meal is vaguely hinted at as “bread and milk, rice, applepye, or something equivalent.” A freshman of 1754 describes it as “a pint of milk and half a biscuit, or a meat pye or some other kind.” In the eighteen-twenties the repast had boiled down to nothing but tea and cold bread “of the consistency of wool.”

The recipe for the meat pye is, perhaps fortunately,