Dinner consisted chiefly of meat, a pound per person—of course including bone, fat, and gristle—and always of the cheapest variety in the market. This led to a monotony as intolerable as it was unhealthy. In winter, salt beef long formed the staple item, varied on Saturdays by salt fish. (In the early history of Dartmouth, salt pork was almost the only meat procurable.[1]) Occasionally “the pickle leaked out of the beef barrel,” so that in a few days the contents became really formidable. At one such dinner, when a distinct flavor of corruption was in the air, the tutor whose turn it was to say grace rather unfortunately invoked the divine blessing “upon this fresh instance of thy bounty.” The grace, by all accounts, was not well received[2]
In the spring and summer, lamb supplanted this saline regimen with equally exasperating regularity. Contrary to the old notion that a man assimilates the characteristics as well as the substance of the animals he feeds on, the more the students ate of this emblem of meekness, the more irritable they became. When the saturation point was reached, they would besiege the Steward’s lodgings and fill the air with horrid discords of bleating and baaing, until the distracted functionary appeared and promised a change of bill. At New Haven, it is said, similar relief was secured by the more “direct
