Every popular college girl has her exclusive little salon, be it only nine by twelve, where she is the center of scintillating sallies and spontaneous merrymaking. Possessing a genuine love of fun and a wholesom craving for the aliments essential to good living,d espite all charges of animalism in other respects, the college girl has from her first freshman days reveled in "larks" and "spreads" and "sprees." Larks and spreads and sprees - three luscious words, the true inwardness (take it literally if you like) of whose meaning only the initiated can appreciate. Spread? The world at large repeats the word with an indifferent, rising inflection and with almost as great a lack of comprehension as was displayed on the dismayed countenance of a German housemaid in a college dormitory when all unwittingly she stubled into the midst of a midnight frolic - or at least 'twas at an hour supposed to be sacred to a school-girl's beauty sleep.
"A spret (spread?" queried Babetta. "But, moreover, I tot a spret was somet'ing you put on a bet."
"It is," roared the girls in chorus; "that's just what it is - something you put on a bed!"
And there you have the definition in a nutshell, for a table of any size is unknown in the den of the average college girl. Chairs there are a few, a window-seat of course, the floor always, 'tis true - but the bed, that is the deux ex machina, although it may be wholly unable to perform any marvelous mechanical metamorphosis, such as changing into an upright piano at one minute's notice and into an old-fashioned clock the next. In its primitive and absolutely uneducated state this article of furniture can, however, serve remarkably varied purposes, from mere sitting accommodations to a refrigerator or buffet substitute. It will hold seven or eight guests comfortably, besides all the dishes, cracker-boxes, olive-bottles, jelly-jars, paper bags and other banqueting (or, more appropriately speaking, spreading) paraphernalia incident to a well-ordered and properly conducted feast.
While one fair guest, perched on a pillow, cuts bread with a penknife, and another, curled up beside her, scrapes chocolate with a miniature hand-saw, borrowed from a girl interested in the sloid [sic] hobby, a third, mayhap, spears olives with a hat-pin. At the foot of the bed, her shirt-waist sleeves rolled up and her pompdour decidedly askew from repeated smotherings of her head in a near-by pillow when overcome with mirth, a plump specimen of a girl splits oyster-crackers and deftly sandwiches sweet chocolate between them - "a combination wholly unequaled," she guarantees, "for spoiling the appetite."
Meanwhile the rosy-cheeked hostess, picturesquely Oriental in her flowing kimono of gay design, presides over the chafing-dish, wherein oysters are creaming or eggs are scrambling or - speak it low - sausages are "doing" to a turn.
She did not always possess the luxury of a chafing-dish, this young collegiate hostess. Many a bain-marie, or double-boiler proviso, has her ingenuity fashioned to meet the emergency of the moment - one small saucepan tottering perilously within another on top of a small kerosene-stove balanced on a mahogany desk-chair, or a tin pail, perhaps, bobbing about in a basin. These were always harrowing performances. Even so slight an interruption as a knock at the door might upset the nice equilibrium of such apparatus. It did on one memorable occasion, just after the retiring-bell had sounded and lights were supposed to vanish instantly. There was no mistaking the knock, authoritative, eloquent of matronly reproof. Out went the light and - horrors! - out went the fudge, over the chair and the carpet. yet even at this crucial moment silence as intense as the darkness reigned over the scene of the tragedy. This was, of course, where the advantages of the higher education of women came to the rescue - the ability to exercise moral restraint (what ordinary woman would not have screamed?), to command a situation (think of the loss of the fudge!), but not, alas, to thwart the fixed law of cuase and effect, for there was the carpet! To put it mildly, it was sticky; by the end of the semester 'twas stiff and - and peculiar. What wonder that visions of discovery upon the removal of the charitable rug, and of bills for damages, occasionally troubled the thoughts of these young transgressors in the vacation days that followed? But before college opened its doors again in the fall, some good fairy put it into the heart of a benevolent old gentleman to "remember" the institution financially, and oh, great good fortune, to add to his bequest this unique condition, that all carpets in the several dormitories should be superseded by hard wood floors!
To the prevalence of such dire disasters the ceremonial chafing-dish has brought a happy ultimatum. Accustomed to the sight of a "chafer" in her grandmother's household - not for real cooking, to be sure, but for keeping muffins hot at the breakfast-table - the college girl was suddenly inspired with the thought of its social possibilities. Behold her, the pioneer of a lost art, of the renaissance of culinary skill, befitting the pen of poet and the palate of an epicure! The bachelor man here challenges the claim of the bachelor maid - but let him gallantly recognize his debt to her felicitous inspiration, the rest content in his role of epicure.
To-day no college-girl's preliminary college outfit is complete without a chafing-dish - it is the sine qua non of her all-around popularity in the new life before her. Her first letters home contain rapturous accounts of savory concoctions devoured after study-hours by a dozen or more "simply famished" friends, accounts which cause her mother to look anxious and her maiden aunt's upper lip to stiffen perceptibly, as she exclaims, "How can any one stomach things cooked in a bedroom!"
In what ineffable scorn (or would it be, after all, curiosity?) this same proper lady would elevate her aristocratic nose, could she witness the actual modus operandi? Bouillon prepared in a chafing-dish might merit her approval, but how about popping the corn which college girls regard as its necessary concomitant? At such times the only dish-pan "on the floor" is procured, and a generous amount of lard dumped into its capacious center. Two willing martyrs to the cuase then mount on chairs, and bold this ample receptacle over the gas-jet until the lard is "piping hot." Next the corn is added, and substitutes "spell" the first two girls, shaking the pan back and forth until the batch is popped. So, by good-natured cooperation, the tedious task is accomplished.
However much solicitous mothers may worry over the indigestibility of these toothsome feasts, and maiden aunts cry out against their unconventionality, the "box from home" is nevertheless their most vital stimulus. What tremors of anticipation over its expected arrival, what shrieks of delight over its unpacking, to which momentous undertaking every girl within ear-shot is forthwith summoned!
"A cake, a cake, upon my soul it is a cake!" cries one.
"For me the sugar doughnut!" exclaims another, as she commenced to eat rapidly around a brown-bordered aperture.
"Oh, but pickles, home-made pickles!" squeals a third, and thereupon business becomes serious.
"Girls," at length queries a soulful-eyed freshman of tender years, "did you ever eat so many doughnuts and pickles at one time that after a while you couldn't tell for the life of you which you were eating - doughnuts or pickles?"
"No, I never have," drily comments a stately senior; "but it strikes me that that would be a very good point at which to stop."
On the closet shelf of the college-girl's room may be seen a goodly stock of domestic supplies, "every ready" in demand - coffee, eggs, canned tomato (oh, direful day when this ferments and bursts its bonds!), pancake-flour, etc. The value of some of this motley stock, the educated little housekeeper will admit, is questionable. When out for her afternoon constitutional she is so often tempted to patronize a "free eat," as she calls it, and having partaken liberally of feathery pancakes, fluffy fish-balls or coffee "fit for the gods," is then easily persuaded to do the reciprocity act and buy of the salesman's wares. But alas! lacking somehow the demonstrator's professional touch, the coffee of her own making proves often muddy, the pancakes heavy and the fish-balls - oh, anything but fluffy!
Of course, there's a bottle of wood-alcohol on the closet shelf, though in her extended experience the college girl long ago discovered that other fluids are equally satisfactory for burning. Perfumery of many varieties has proved most efficacious, not to mention hair-tonics, which have the additional advantage of being aromatic. Shades of her maiden aunt! such a revelation should never have been revealed. Let us drop a curtain upon other possible disclosures, such as the aftermath of one of these little functions, when, the demands of higher education having menawhile intervened, jellies, once so tempting, cling tenaciously to spoons and saucers, chocolate adheres viciously to everything, and - but "enough said."
Although a college chafing-dish party may be, and often is, the merest informal gathering together of a few congenial friends at a moment's notice, it is sometimes a more ceremonious affair, to which guests are summoned by written invitations. In the manufacturing of the latter the college girl has a chance to utilize her further versatility. Clever with her brush, she devises out of heavy paper the facsimile of a chafing-dish cover, the invitation being written on the under side of it, or she designs in the corner of her calling-card an artistic brazier, from which issue little rings of appetizing suggestiveness. Souvenirs there are, too, occasionally, which more than often are ornamented with apt quotations found in the archives of the college library - from the lines of a Greek poet, perchance, down to a genial saying by old Izaak Walton.
The guests are fond of surprising their hostess by appearing in original costumes - representing, it may be, familiar psychological terms, such as "the infant phenomenon," "the immovable eye," "the fringe of consciousness," etc. - or more frivolously inclined, they may simply exchange identities by means of borrowed clothing.
A unique and popular custom is to send the guests a sort of "present this card at the door" invitaiton - that is, a request that each girl come prepared to "do something" for those assembled while the hostess is busy with culinary activities. This prerogative never acts as one might suppose, as a damper to acceptance. The college girl loves to "do things." She has been known to establish an enviable reputation as an entertainer just by laughing so infectiously that the whole company must perforce follow suit and wax inordinately amused over - nothing. She can sing comic songs inimicably, can the college girl, dance a pas seul or "speak a piece."
For impromptu dramatization the college girl of to-day is famous, and often a most captivating program is produced at a moment's notice. While the majority of the guests are puzzling over a frisky-looking like of humorous notes sketched in burnt match on brown paper, and supposed to represent the air of some familiar song, a few other energetic souls are ransacking closets, trunks and window-boxes for "properties." By the time some one has solved the mystery of the stray bar of music, and all are merrily humming the quick strain, which is quite likely to be "I went to the animal fair," or "The owl and the pussy-cat when to sea," the curtain rises and there, in very truth, sits "the old racoon by the light of the moon, combing his auburn hair," or the owl and the pussy-cat are seen putting to sea "in a beautiful pea-green boat" in so realistic a fashion that the sympathetic spectators are for the moment filled with apprehension over the unmistakable disappearance of the "honey," to say nothing of "plenty of money wrapped up in a five-pound note."
The impersonation of the several members of the faculty is another popular form of amusement, and might be called the college-girls' variation of the old-time charades. Each girl in turn goes out of the room, and reappears imitating the walk or some particular characteristic of a well-known professor. The august pedagogue might not recognize himself, to be sure, but his personality is quick to be detected by the keen analysis of his pupils.
So great a fad have these little "chafer" parties become, that in many colleges throughout the country some six or more girls form a club for weekly celebrations, each member bearing the expense of the supper in turn, and each holding it in her own room. Thus, as you pass down a corridor of the college dormitory, and read the many characteristic signs upon its various doors - "Busy, do not disturb," "To be found in Room 28," "Asleep," "You're not wanted," "This is my busy time," etc. - you may run across something like this: "Whitney Night, 9-10- P.M." The dash is significant (not as a numerical sign, however!), and the savory odors which will stray through the crack of the door elucidate for the unbidden stranger the mysteries within.
Bachelor man or bachelor maid, to which shall be credited the revival of the festal chafing-dish? Lost ages ago with the tribes of Israel, buried in the tombs of Egypt and under the ruins of Pompeii, its little flame was at length rekindled in the early days of "Merrie England," and later in the salons of French wit and fashion. Then it was again doomed to die down and to continue smoldering unnoticed, until some modern enthusiasts - and chief among them, perhaps, the college girl - should once more fan it back to life.
With the passing of winter passeth also the reign of the chafing-dish. Then in this companion of good cheer and caterer to keen appetites relegated to the top shelf or allowed to stand idle while its mistress satisfies her thirst with "soda-tickets" - twelve drinks for one dollar - and concerning which she has been known to boast that she could easily consume one ticket daily. But that her pocketbook sometimes fails to keep pace with this purely feminine longing the bulletin board in college hall is often too true a witness. Placed there in the hope that "he who runs" will read, one may often see some such pathetic announcement as this: "For Sale, Cheap, Half a Soda-Ticket."
Woman's Home Companion, April 1904