Chapter 5 Food

We always had the same meal on Saturday nights at Pencey. It was supposed to be a big deal, because they gave you steak. I'll bet a thousand bucks the reason they did that was because a lot of guys' parents came up to school on Sunday, and old Thurmer probably figured everybody's mother would ask their darling boy what he had for dinner last night, and he'd say 'steak'. They were these little hard, dry jobs that you could hardly cut. You always got these very lumpy mashed potatoes on steak night. For desert you got Brown Betty, which nobody ate, except maybe the little kids in the lower school that didn't know any better - and guys like Ackley that ate everything.