Feast of the Day, 11 May

Today's Feast of the Day almost couldn't be more boring, but I'm just glad I found one at all! Before I go on with today's Feast, let me tell you why.
I looked at a book this morning that was so old there's no way to tell how old it was; the catalogue just says (1823-1852). It could have been published any time between then! Anyway, I looked at it because it had a story called "The Boarding-School Feast" in it. Except that the feast in question was wicked and wrong, according to the author. The food - pound cake and mince-pies and grapes and such - doesn't sound bad, but the feast ends in confusion and disaster: two girls ruin their dresses, two get food in their hair, two are sick all night, one cuts her foot. Oh, and money that should have been spent to buy a cloak for a poor woman is spent on the feast, so the poor woman gets rheumatism. Wicked, wicked greed!
(This is interesting because that very old book is British. Something I read earlier this week said that British girls read about the feasts in American books with huge amounts of envy - they got boiled mutton and bread and milk a lot. So this might be a cultural difference as well - at least for a while, until Enid Blyton wrote some very elaborate midnight feasts into her school stories in the 1940s).
The next book I looked at (Polly's Polly at Boarding School, 1928) mentioned “comsommé, jellied chicken, hot muffins and apple tapioca" as a "sumptuous feast"! Ugh.
But later in that same book, there was a boring, but slightly yummier, Christmas dinner, which by default is the Feast of the Day:
“The dinner was a huge success. With roast turkey stuffed with chestnuts at one end of the table, and boiled turkey stuffed with oysters at the other, cranberry sauce and apple sauce, mince pie and pumpkin pie, was it any wonder that the fruit and nuts were slighted?”