The Vassar Chronicles | Dining at Vassar in the Nineteenth Century

Jon Cruz Columnist

It seems that as far back as one goes, campus dining—the food, the venues, the service, the experience—has always been a source of controversy and discussion among college students. Vassar is not exempt from this trend.

From the very beginning, college food was a central part of the Vassar experience. Public health officials, respected medical authorities, and peddling quacks alike had descended upon the wealthy brewer from Poughkeepsie who sought to provide women with their own Harvard and Yale: such a foolhardy experiment would certainly amount to the physical destruction of women, complained many a man. Women, the prevailing reasoning went, were simply not properly constituted for higher education. Too much stress would destroy their brains, their stamina, and, most importantly, their ovaries.

Yes, indeed, early Vassar administrators had an almost obsessive interest in maintaining the physical well-being of their young students, particularly because there was a general belief that women’s health was determined almost exclusively by the health of their ovaries. Nutrition, rest, and exercise were seen as the perfect tools for balancing this often rebellious set of organs.

The exercise component was built in to the College plan from the start. As many may have heard, there is evidence that the considerable width of the hallways in Main was due to plans from the College to enforce indoor running several times a day during the winter to ensure proper exercise to keep young women fertile. Nutrition, too, was seen as a part of this regimen.

However, the concept of nutritional science was still several decades away at the time of Vassar’s founding. Nonetheless, the early campus dining services—run out of the office of the College Warden, something of an ancestor to the modern Director of Residential Life—strove to provide students with hearty, if not incredibly well-balanced, meals. Students also dined in elegance; what are today the multi-purpose rooms of the dorms were once elaborate dining halls. The kitchens in the MPRs were larger in those days, allowing each dorm to operate its own dining hall. ACDC, a distant concept for the College, was not born until after the campus went co-ed in 1969. One contemporary observer described the dining spaces as “bright, cheerful and pretty.” In fact, she had only one complaint: “The Main Hall alone is unattractive.”

These early dining areas contained quite a few classy touches. While students were not able to fill out a comment card to voice their complaints, students from 1865 on were treated to a different set of cards by the dining staff: Bills-of-Fare, upon which one could find the day’s menu. Students were served three meals: breakfast, dinner, and supper; the latter term meant something closer to dessert, it would seem.

Several complaints often heard today—at Vassar, and sometimes elsewhere—are that the dining options have been shrinking, that the quality of the food is uneven, and that there is little variety. While students had nothing to compare Vassar to in terms of the first complaint, the latter two exasperations were probably shared by early Vassarions.

A menu for Friday, June 8, 1866 called for a breakfast of mackerel, a dinner of roast beef, and a supper of custard. Other days specified coffee and tea with dinner—presumably otherwise unavailable—or boiled ham, sweet corn, and rather nondescript “soup.”

Other breakfasts included “Irish stew,” liver, baked potatoes, corn bread and hash, “cold meat” (yes, nothing more than “cold meat”), scrambled eggs, and the like. It is hard to tell if dinner was consistently filling; the likeliness seemed to depend solely on what was being served on that particular day. If one was lucky, one might have a complete meal for dinner as an option, such as one particular day’s serving of “roast beef, boiled ham, lettuce, and apple pie.” On other days, asparagus or rice pudding might be a complete dish. Other foodstuffs for dinner included veal pie with pickles, cold roast beef, parsnips, veal stew, and mackerel. (The latter appears to have been quite the popular all-purpose meal: both a breakfast dish and a dinner delight, one might wonder what a late nineteenth century nutritionist would have said about the balance of these meals.)

In fact, Mrs. S. T. Rorer, who wrote about nutritional balance in Ladies’ Home Journal, had a lot to say. In the Nov. 1905 issue of that magazine, in an article titled “What College Girls Eat,” she glowingly wrote that Northwestern University hired a trained dietician to design its meals for the young girls and to keep things hygienic, organized, and feminine.

“At Vassar College,” she lamented, however, “I found things very different. There is here a strong inclination to ridicule the idea of a hygienic table or any special care toward the womanliness of the students. The president in his last report makes an effort to impress upon the public that a hygienic table is entirely out of the question and that such tables have been utter failures in like institutions. This is absolutely incorrect. It is true that inexperienced women, graduates of colleges and schools of technology, have failed to produce palatable and hygienic foods. This only proves correct the statement that the average college woman is not trained for her life work.

“The president of Vassar also tells us that ‘A table like ours must minister to a great variety of tastes and conditions—not infants’ either, but of people of some convictions regarding the circumscription of their liberties.’ I agree with him; but where ‘liberties’ are detrimental to the public good and to the individual, why allow them to continue? Why rear generations of invalids and weaken the race without an effort to improve conditions?

“The president also contends that ‘large dormitories with two hundred students at table give greater freedom and more of college life.’ If noise, rapid eating, and ill-selected foods are a part of a woman’s college life, this is true. If, on the other hand, a woman should be trained to select such foods from a large table as are best suited to her conditions, Vassar is a failure.

“Hygienic foods are not experiments in any well-regulated home. Do the pupils of Vassar belong to a different race? Are they unlike girls at other colleges? I think not—but Vassar has a large, well-equipped, and much-used infirmary. In fact, this is one of the things to which a visitors’ attention is first called.”

Ouch. Biting words from a respected writer. But it wasn’t all ad hom attacks; indeed, Rorer was genuinely concerned with the nutritional content of the food. She explained, “In all the bills-of-fare there was too much nitrogenous food, too few green vegetables, too little fruit, and an entire absence of salads. The dietary was too largely composed of dead things, like hot bread, white bread, cookies and cakes, and contained too many sweets. The luncheons were heavy, too complicated for students who must, immediately after eating, hurry to recreation-rooms.”

These sweets and after-dinner snacks (again, “suppers”) were quite popular on campus. They varied in fattiness and tastiness: some of them included Farina crackers and soda biscuits, while others consisted simply of hot bread, oyster crackers, or prunes, while others carried more exotic (or at least descriptive) labels, such as “mush & milk with cheese.”

It would be interesting to know what Rorer would have thought about the College’s elaborate Thanksgiving meals. Today, such meals are served with little fanfare in ACDC around the time of the national holiday. In early Vassar, however, this was an event to be valued; the College took the preparation of food for Thanksgiving very seriously. Perhaps the relative difficulties of traveling made it far more likely that students would remain on campus. In any case, the directions from food service officials made it clear that they took the first-ever Thanksgiving at the College quite seriously:

“Dinner at half past four—no after meal—oyster soup, a turkey…on each table—mashed potatoes—celery—squash—fried parsnips—cranberries—pickled beets—poor man’s plum pudding for each table—ask Miss Lyman how to make it—coffee—apples. If this pudding cannot be made ask Mrs. Campbell about a Bedott pudding. The above Bill of Fare is desired on Thanksgiving Day.”

Later Thanksgivings got more elaborate. The 1867 meal featured “mock turtle soup,” boiled tongue and leg mutton with casper sauce, and chickens’ liver sautee with fine herbs. The 1879 meal was accompanied by entertainment. Students and faculty members presented a bit of dinner theater—The Fast Coach—as well as an operetta (Il Jacobi) and a performance from the orchestra.

By 1880, the Bill of Fare for Thanksgiving appeared again simplified, featuring fewer (and less exotic) choices for soups, roasts, sauces, entrees, relishes, vegetables, fruits, pastries, and nuts. Later menus included a “cold young pig,” baked macaroni, or a helping of chicken salad.

Whatever the variety, food has been an important part of Vassar from the beginning. However, as the advent of nutritional thinking, home economics, and euthenics began to take America by storm, the College was increasingly pressured to rethink the ways it fed its students. As pupils became more actively involved, they expected more from the school. This conflict continues today, and will be the subject of the next piece in this series.