Perennial Beef

Quite frankly, we think the food at Thayer is better than average, and we've never heard of anyone wasting away from dining there. But for a glimpse of how people felt about what passed for cooking during the first hundred years or so of the College's existence, pay a visit to the current display, "Victualing," mounted in the History Room of Baker Library (near the West entrance) by Evelyn Marcus, exhibition assistant for the library's reference services. The exhibit consists mostly of manuscript material no mouldy beef or stale biscuits were dredged up from the College archives but a vivid picture emerges of a place where people were un- likely to have asked for seconds.

If ever there was a groaning board during those first hundred years, it was the Board of Trustees, who in 1776 found it necessary to respond to culinary criticism. The minutes of a meeting that year record that the trustees "do not find that there has been any just ground or reason ... for complaints respecting the badness of the Diet of the Students," but they do admit that for a few days "some Beef was served by the Cooks" that was "accidentally tainted in a small Degree...."

The complaints had even come to the attention of Governor Wentworth, who on July 6, 1774, wrote to warn Eleazar Wheelock of reports that "your provision for the Students is extremely bad their entertainment neither clean, plentiful nor wholesome; tho' the price and expence exceeds for comfortable living; that the youth are thereby unhealthy and debilitated their constitutions impair'd & their friends and Parents highly disgusted."

Perhaps anticipating a rebuke from the governor, Wheelock wrote to Wentworth the following day defending the food provided by the College, although he did admit that "sometimes the Cooks have made mistakes." The problem was hardly a new one. Wheelock wrote in 1773, "I hope Providence designs to deliver us from the plague of unskillful, deceitful, and un- faithful cooks."