to be picked up at random. Old sailors have a saying that when a seaman becomes unfit to go aloft any more, he ships as a cook; and quite as little regard for professional training and experience was shown aboard the good ship Harvard. Among the early despots of the kitchen, one had formerly been a locksmith, one had been bred a saddler, and two had followed the inglorious calling of tailors. So late as 1765 the appropriation for the whole culinary staff was only £37½ sterling per annum.[1] Well might the hard-pressed students echo Garrick’s epigram—“God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks.”[2]
As a further measure of economy, the cook’s assistant or general scullion was sometimes an Indian[3] impressed from the surrounding forest—whose interests probably lay more with scalps than with skillets, and whose views might be thought unconventional as to the best use of a slow fire—but more often an African slave. Of the latter genus, the names of “Mungo” Russell, who
- ↑ “College Laws” for 1765.
- ↑ At Yale, after a “walk-out” in protest against the quality of Commons, “the cooks were regularly tried before the faculty. It was a rare tribunal & withal amusing. They were all forthwith dismissed from service except two.” Mitchell, Reminiscences of Scenes and Characters in [Yale] College, 119.
- ↑ In 1691 the Corporation ordered the Steward to find for the Commencement dinner “Wood, Candles, [extra] Cooks, Turn-Spitt Indians, and things [!] of the like Nature.” The same functionary “Paid for help at ye commencemt in ye year 1703: to ye Indians 0.2.10.” Harv. Alumni Bulletin, xxii, 308.
