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Title page of Movable Feasts: A Reconnaissance of the Origins and Consequences of Fluctuations in Meal-Times, with Special Attention to the Introduction of Luncheon and Afternoon Tea, by Arnold Palmer (London: Oxford University Press, 1952) |
What time’s dinner, Ma?
Russell Doust has a bit of fun tracking changes in our grazing habits
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‘A Family at Tea’, c.1730
Reproduced from Movable Feasts, by Arnold Palmer (London: Oxford University Press, 1952) |
The younger of my two sons would come home from high school, hungry, in the late afternoon and say ‘What time’s dinner, Ma?’ ‘About another hour, dear’ usually resulted in ‘Well, I’ll have a Vegemite sandwich then’. Recalling this interchange prompted me to ponder two things: one, the name of the evening meal, and two, the time at which it was taken.
Many an Australian youngster in earlier times would have said tea, not dinner, and we know from the literature that for much of early modern history dinner meant the main meal, originally eaten in the middle of the day. Why did the time change, and whatever happened to lunch?
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The Tea-Table’.
Reproduced from The English Table in History and Literature, by Charles Cooper (London:S. Low, Marston, [1929]) |
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‘‘The Feast of Charles I to the Spanish Ambassador’
Reproduced from The English Table in History and Literature, by Charles Cooper (London: S. Low, Marston, [1929])
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The National Library has a number of sources which throw some light on this. One of my favourites is Arnold Palmer’s Movable Feasts: a Reconnaissance of the Origins and Consequences of Fluctuations in Meal-Times with Special Attention to the Introduction of Luncheon and Afternoon Tea. This smallish book was published by Oxford University Press in 1952, and is important because of his use of literary sources as evidence. ‘Much has been written’, he says, ‘of the kind of food and amount of food consumed by our forebears. Less has been heard of the times at which they congregated at table and of the way in which their meals fitted into the arrangement of their days … In the main I have confined my attention to gentlefolk, for the reason that there is more evidence about them than about the rest of the population; and I have often, perhaps usually, looked for this evidence in novels rather than in journals and letters. If a diarist mentions the hour at which he dined, it is probable (whether he provides an explanation or not) that it marks a variation from habit. No novelist can afford to be so casual.’
Palmer’s book is not the only source, however. Gerard Brett’s Dinner Is Served: A History of Dining in England, 1400–1900 (London: Hart-Davis, 1968) has useful illustrations, many from public and private collections in Toronto, Canada, and quite fascinating recipes and menus. The English at Table by John Hampson (London: Collins, 1944) has delightful coloured and black and white illustrations; The English Table in History and Literature by Charles Cooper (London: S.Low, Marston, [1929]) consists partly of articles contributed to The Epicure and The Table magazines which depict ‘certain aspects of English table habits and customs at successive periods from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century’. If you want to make a skirret pie (skirret, a species of water parsnip—Oxford English Dictionary), or roast a shoulder of lamb stuffed with oysters, rosemary, thyme, parsley, egg yolks, onion, pepper, wine vinegar and sweet butter, this is the book for you.
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Jim Fitzpatrick
Unidentified family having a meal, Drouin, Victoriac.1944
gelatin silver photograph;
15.9 x 21.5 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an24296089 |
But because I wanted to know more about dinner times, and the times of other meals, I started with Palmer. He notes that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Henry VII’s England dined at 11 a.m., while 150 years later, Cromwell’s England dined at 1 o’clock—a pattern that prevailed for the leisured classes until well into the nineteenth century. I did not find much written about the meal-time habits of ordinary working people, but Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise at Candleford (first published in 1939 and describing her recollections of a village in the earlier England of the 1890s) makes it clear that farm labourers had their main meal at the end of the working day, and they called it ‘tea’.
Very early in the morning, before daybreak for the greater part of the year, the hamlet men would throw on their clothes, breakfast on bread and lard, snatch the dinner-baskets [note the term] which had been packed for them overnight, and hurry off across fields and over stiles to the farm.
But later,
Here, then, were the three chief ingredients of the one hot meal a day: bacon from the flitch, vegetables from the garden, and flour for the roly-poly. This, called ‘tea’, was taken in the evening, when the men were home from the fields and the children from school, for neither could get home at mid-day.
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‘Jorrocks’s Hunt Breakfast’. Coloured lithograph by Henry Alken, 1874
Reproduced from The English at Table, by John Hampson (London: Collins, 1944) |
In the 1780s in England, Palmer tells us that for gentlefolk the day began with breakfast, but not before two or three hours had been taken up by other pursuits. ‘Letters were written, housekeepers interviewed, walks taken, flowers picked and arranged, music practised and studies pursued, and calls, business or social, could be paid’. The first meal of the day, then, might begin at 10 o’clock and end by about 11 o’clock—a far cry from 21st-century practice—but it appears to have been a fairly light meal. On the other hand, he quotes George Borrow less than a century later (in Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery) breakfasting at the White Lion Inn on ‘a pot of hare; ditto of trout; pot of prepared shrimps; dish of plain shrimps; tin of sardines; beautiful beefsteak; eggs, muffin; large loaf, and butter, not forgetting capital tea’. After such a meal it is hardly surprising that many men, especially office workers, did not bother with luncheon (or the less formal ‘lunch’) which was often a light meal for ladies. Palmer refers us to The Family Friend of 1853:
This meal is admissible only when the interval between the breakfast and dinner is very prolonged, or when the quantity of food taken at breakfast is very small. The lower classes … dine early, and thus with them luncheon is unnecessary … [But] with adults of the middling and higher classes … the practice of dining late has become general, and, with such, luncheon becomes a necessary meal. It should be taken about five hours after breakfast, and though called by another name it may be considered a light dinner, taken to allay the cravings of nature, but not entirely to destroy the appetite.
We observe that Anglo-Saxon stomachs—perhaps not Continental ones—find it difficult to survive for more than about four or five hours without food. By the Napoleonic Wars luncheon gets a formal name; in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, returning home from London, are treated to ‘the nicest cold luncheon in the world’. So we begin to see that for some, a midday meal, perhaps called luncheon, becomes a necessity, but by no means a substitute for dinner, which now arrives later—much later. In the early ninteenth century, 4:30 p.m. was common for dinner but it might be as late as 6 o’clock.
In the middle 1800s breakfast moved back to 8 a.m. or 8:30, complete with family prayers, to allow the Victorian businessman to be in his office by 10 a.m. Lunch parties for the ladies, on the other hand, says Palmer, moved to as late as 2 o’clock. This meant, of course, that afternoon tea (which had been invented to fill that uncomfortable gap between lunch and dinner) had to be correspondingly later: five o’clock was fashionable, or even later; and dinner would now be at 7:30, or as late as 8 p.m..
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Big dinner, Brighton Town Hall [between 1870–1900]
photograph albumen;
15.5 x 19.7 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an23814383
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All of the ‘evidence’ above is about England. Less has been written about the food habits of Australians. A manuscript diary from my own family, a daily account of the comings and goings of the well-off middle-class Booth family in Melbourne in the 1880s and 1890s, makes it clear that dinner, the main meal, was taken in the middle of the day, but this may have been old-fashioned. On the other hand, Ada Cambridge, a clergyman’s wife, in her autobiographical Thirty Years in Australia, writing of the Victoria of the late nineteenth century refers often to evening dinner parties. But Geoffrey Drake Brockman, a Western Australian soldier on sick leave in England during the First World War, was given tea by his hosts—plum cake and scones with strawberry jam and cream—and soon after had to face dinner, complete with roast beef. ‘I had forgotten’, he wrote in The Turning Wheel, ‘that in Australia afternoon tea gets its full title and tea frequently signifies an evening meal’.
A Survey of Food Habits and Beliefs in a Canberra Suburb (Canberra: Australian National University), by Dougal Jeffries working in Narrabundah in 1978, records that ‘a number of women said that their husbands expected to eat meat more or less every night’, which implies that this was the main meal of the day, but we do not know what these households called it. However, the survey also found that a high proportion of these households had the main Sunday meal in the middle of the day, and some also on Saturday. Even if they called the weekday main meal ‘tea’, Saturday and Sunday meals must have been called ‘dinner’.
Does it matter what time we eat our main meal of the day? Does it matter what we call it? It is now common in some households to call the evening meal supper, even if what is eaten in the middle of the day is called lunch; and Sunday brunch is no more than George Borrow’s Welsh breakfast. It is interesting to observe how meal times and the names by which they are identified reflect changes in social attitudes: supper as the main meal of the day may be the invention of the chattering classes, but equally it reflects a modern retreat from the formal dining of the past, while tea, as the evening and main meal, may simply be a product of both regional and class differences.
RUSSELL DOUST is a former State Librarianof New South Wales, and latterly a cultural historian.
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