A menu from the College of Rhode Island, now Brown University, gives a glimpse of the bland fare that seems to have been the lot of college students in the 1780s. At the end of the Revolutionary War the teenage, male, mostly ministerial students of the college took their dinners—that is, their midday meal—in a common dining hall, as given in a typical weekly menu:

Two' meals of salt beef and pork, with peas, beans, greens, roots, etc., and puddings. For drink, good small beer and cider.

Two meals of fresh meat, roasted, baked, broiled, or fried, with proper sauce or vegetables.

One meal of soup and fragments.

One meal of boiled fresh meat with proper sauce and broth.

One meal of salt or fresh fish, with brown bread.

Supperswefe of hasty pudding, rice, corn mush, white bread, or milk porridge with...