Students taste quail, pheasant, and even a 1766 style apple pie in culinary history course celebrating Rutgers' anniversary. Watch video
NEW BRUNSWICK -- The menu is elegant.
First, a butternut squash soup with apple cider and a bacon crumble.
Next, roast bobwhite quail with cornbread stuffing that's paired with a medallion of venison, cranberry compote, and a Madeira wine sauce.
And finally, the highlight, apple pie -- two ways -- as it would have been prepared in 1766 and as it's made now.
"I'm about to try venison for the first time," says Greg Farrell, diving into the second course. He takes a bite and instantly nods his head in approval. "Oh, it's good. Yeah."
The meat selections, the white linen tablecloths, the nice silverware, are all things you might expect from a fancy restaurant.
But Farrell is in the Rutgers Neilson Dining Hall on Douglass Campus. He's one of 60 students enrolled in the freshman course "Rutgers 250: A Taste of Culinary History."
The class examines the evolution of food by taking students on a culinary journey from the university's beginnings in 1766 to today. This, their final culminating meal with venison and quail, was created to give them a taste of what students would have likely eaten in the early days of the school.
The course, designed by William Hallman, chair of the Rutgers Department of Human Ecology, and ecology professors Cara Cuite and Mary Nucci, is part of the lead up to Rutgers' 250th anniversary celebration that kicks off Tuesday.
"Students today are hearing a lot about what Rutgers was like 250 years ago, but it's hard to make that connection across time," Cuite, a course instructor, says. "Our students in this class can connect to students of the past through a sensory experience -- it's not reading a book, it's not looking at photographs, but it's actually eating the food that they would have eaten."
Once a week for 10 weeks the students took part in tastings related to the lecture of the day. In one class they tried 10 different kinds of tomatoes harvested from the Rutgers Snyder Farm. In another, the students had a traditional tea service in Rutgers' first dorm. There was a class on bread and one on cheeses.
In the section on meats, students got to try corn-fed and grass-fed meats side by side. They compared traditional cured bacon to contemporary cured bacon, and to top it off, Hallman slipped in the exciting addition of pheasant.
From food production, to farm labor, to food laws and regulations, Hallman says the topics seemed endless.
"Once we got into it we realized we could have a four year course on this!"
The best part Hallman says, was how often his lectures contained discussions of the impact both Rutgers and New Jersey have had on food evolution -- from Rutgers' role in developing tomatoes for the Campbell's Soup Company in the 1930s, to Vineland, New Jersey being the birthplace of Welch's Grape Juice.
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For the class's final meal, Hallman, Cuite, and Nucci partnered with Barry Squier, a self-proclaimed history nut and chef manager of Neilson Dining Hall who pulled from six different 18th century recipes to make the 1766 style apple pie.
"I mean I even looked at my great, great, great-grandmother's recipes because I have some recipe cards from the 1800s from her," Squier says right before the start of food service.
His heirloom pie is less sweet than today's pies with a flavor profile of nutmeg and molasses instead of cinnamon, sugar, and vanilla. Judging from the students' "oohs" and "aahs," the pie was an instant hit.
"I wasn't expecting the past to taste so rich and so flavorful," Suraj Rathod says at the end of what he describes as a very satisfying meal. "It was just an amazing experience being part of the class eating all the crazy and awesome types of food that we had."
And that is exactly the sentiment Hallman hopes his students will have: that they won't stop talking about this experience.
"My entire goal, and I told the students this on the very first day, was to make them really annoying (with their food knowledge) at Thanksgiving dinner," Hallman says. "That's what I was really looking for --, to make it fun."
Adya Beasley may be reached at abeasley@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @adyabeasley. Find NJ.com on Facebook.