Lunch

“ It is a mad chase from food to food. You rise and hastily swallow a heavy English breakfast. You ride in the Row a while, ride toward a lunch table—and an English lunch, especially in the season, means a bigger dinner than any Frenchman or other highly civilized person ever willingly sat down to. Hardly is this long lunch over before it is time for tea—which means not merely tea, but toast, and sandwiches, and hot muffins, and many kinds of heavy cake, and often fruit or jam. Tea is to give you an appetite for the dinner that follows—and what a dinner! ”

“ Be extremely careful, unless you know exactly the ways of your host with regard to his shooting-lunch, not to express to him before lunch any very definite opinion as to what the best kind of lunch is. If, for instance, you rashly declare that, for your own part, you detest a solemn sit-down-in-a-farmhouse lunch, and that your ideal is a sandwich, a biscuit and a nip out of a flask, and if you then find yourself lunching off three courses at a comfortable table, why you'll be in a bit of a hole. Consistency would prompt you to abstain, appetite urges you to eat. What is a poor talker to do? ”

“ You will lunch there on a shaded terrace, assisted by a sympathetic waiter, who understands that a good lunch is an end in itself, and not merely a device for keeping body and soul together until the evening. ”

“ In the hour of need it is never found wanting. To dine well, authorities have proclaimed in ex cathedrâ utterance, you must lunch lightly; but not, therefore, does it follow that the light luncheon should be repellently prosaic. Let it be dainty—a graceful lyric—that it may fill you with hope of the coming dinner. And lyrical indeed is the savoury sandwich, well cut and garnished, served on rare faïence or old silver; a glass, or perhaps two, of Bordeaux of some famous vintage, to strengthen its subtle flavour. ”

“ I've booked a table at the Troc, and you're both to lunch there right through the rehearsals. If you can't get away for lunch, it's to be dinner; but one square meal a day the two of you must have regularly, or there'll be rows. Mind, it isn't to be a meal for more than two!"’ Her face lit with laughter. 'There were some boys in the chorus just as stony as we were; my friend would lunch one day, and I'd lunch the next—we'd each take a boy in turn! ”

“ I find, in settling accounts with the housekeeper, that a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese, has twice been served out to the girls during the past fortnight. How is this? I looked over the regulations, and I find no such meal as lunch mentioned. Who introduced this innovation? and by what authority?”
“I must be responsible for the circumstance, sir,” replied Miss Temple: “the breakfast was so ill prepared that the pupils could not possibly eat it; and I dared not allow them to remain fasting till dinner-time.” ”

“ The light lunch eaten in most homes demands much less time in cooking and eating than does a dinner, and leaves those who have partaken of it more fit for work than they would be were their stomachs burdened with the task of digesting soup, meat, vegetables, and dessert. ”

“ Family lunch is served much as dinner is served unless your mistress prefers to have it as informal as the breakfast.
At either lunch or breakfast, when you pass hot muffins, bread, hot cakes, or pancakes, always pass the butter on the same tray so that no one will have the disagreeable experience of a muffin almost cold before the butter reaches him. ”

“ TO many people the lunch basket and its contents are quite as important as any regularly set-out meal of the day—more important than such occasional luxuries as ceremonious déjeûners à la fourchette and standing lunches. ”

“ The free lunch, which was really free, was served by gorgeous big men in clean white aprons, and for the price of one drink, you could have such a repast as boiled mutton and caper sauce, salmon and cream gravy with mashed potatoes, all sorts of biscuits, apple pie, fruit, and coffee. ”

“ I'll make Michael drive me to town early in the morning, and I'll have everything ready in time. A dinner would be all very well, but a luncheon gives so much better chance to the imagination and the intellect. There're some things you have to have at a dinner, but at a lunch there is nothing you are obliged to have, and nothing you may not have if you want it. And if you don't mind, I'd like you to ask old Miss Panney. ”

“ In many of our large cities, where business prevents the head of the family from returning to dinner until a late hour, luncheon is served about midday and serves as an early dinner for children and servants. There is much less formality in the serving of lunch than of dinner. ”

“ In cold weather I can switch on my bedroom fire from my bed, and as my gas-ring has a long tube, heat my coffee without getting out of bed if I please.
"After breakfast I get up and put on an overall instead of my dress. With no fires and no washstand work and my long-handled cleaners the work is quickly done. I prepare what I need for lunch and dinner; food is so simple a matter when you live alone: my lunch, for example, is generally milk pudding, cheese and fruit, and my dinner of [137] two courses, meat or fish and sweet or cheese, and often I buy cooked food if I am very busy. ”

“ It is getting quiet, save in the all-night lunch rooms, where the fresh baking of doughnuts and cinnamon buns is being set out, and the workers of the night shift are streaming in for their varied and substantial meals. They eat leisurely, with loud talk, or reading the morning papers. ”

“ Dishes of dressed salad, a cold fowl, game, or hot chops, can be put before the hostess or passed by the servant. Soup and fish are never offered at these luncheons. Some people prefer a hot lunch, and chops, birds on toast, or a beefsteak, with mashed potatoes, asparagus, or green pease, are suitable dishes. ”

“ I don’t know whether any of you, gentlemen, ever partook of a real substantial hospitable Scotch breakfast, and then went out to a slight lunch of a bushel of oysters, a dozen or so of bottled ale, and a noggin or two of whiskey to close up with. If you ever did, you will agree with me that it requires a pretty strong head to go out to dinner and supper afterwards. ”

“ To-day, for instance, I’ll tell you what our food was. Breakfast: good oatmeal with boiled milk and sugar, coffee, war bread, which one of the group toasted before the fire for our table, “bacon” the eternal, which is fried ham, and not very good. Lunch: a kind of meat loaf, rice, with cheese (which we have about every other day) , bread and butter, cocoa, and stewed figs, stewed without sugar. ”

“ The luncheons that boys and girls take to school with them are often prepared in so careless a way that they are extremely uninviting. The substantial school lunch can be made just as appetizing as the dainty refreshments at an afternoon tea or at a party. ”

“ The three chief meals of the day are breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
In what I shall call the English hotels, almost everybody maintains the good old English custom of coming down to the salle-à-manger to breakfast; but foreigners, consistently with their home practice, take their meagre breakfast or cup of coffee, scarcely to be designated breakfast, in their bedroom. English people cannot get reconciled to the idea of taking meals in a room in which they sleep. ”

“ Perhaps later in the forenoon, she again drops into a fitful sleep, or she may have to wait until after dinner. There is the midday meal to get, and, if her husband cannot come home, his dinner-pail to pack with a hot lunch to be sent or carried to him. If he is not at home, the lunch is rather a makeshift. ”

“ Breakfast, if we may believe him, goes on from ten till twelve, lunch (a substantial dinner) is prolonged with liqueurs and cigars till close on tea-time, when sandwiches and even ‘bleeding woodcocks’ are provided. Dinner is not till nine, and so late an hour finds everybody hungry again.{223} Then, forgetting that he has told us that eating goes on the whole day, he informs us in another attack on poor Aunt Sally that these same people spend Sunday in riding and driving and going out to tea ten miles away, and careering about on a ‘troop’ of bicycles. ”

“ Under my housekeeping we browse indiscriminately. When we have nothing else to do, we have a meal. If it is nearer noon than morning, we call it dinner. If it is nearer night than noon, we call it supper, unless we have fashionable friends with us, and then we call it dinner, and the other thing lunch ”

“ I get breakfast before I leave and supper after I come home. Father has a cold lunch in the middle of the day, when he eats at all—which isn't often. And on Saturday afternoons and Sundays I do the heavy work. ”

“ I take a big dinner and a light lunch at noon, and a heavy dinner and a simple supper in the evening. A person whose brain is constantly [170] worried about how he can shove off his work on somebody else has to have a substantial diet. The bill of fare for dinner should include everything that abounds in the market—that the literary man can get trusted for.
"After a good rest when dinner is over, remain quiet until supper-time, so that the brain will not be too much agitated for the trials that come after that meal. ”

“ More than one beginner in housekeeping wonders whether a light breakfast of little but a roll and coffee is more healthful than one of several courses. It is an old American idea that luncheon or supper may be light, dinner varied and heavier, but breakfast must be wholesome and nourishing. ”

“ Sometimes lunch is comparatively light so that there are two daily apologies for meals. To make up for these, the third meal may be very hearty. City folk often eat at dinner more than is good for them. ”

“ The scullery maid must clear the kitchen meals and help in all the washing up, take up nursery tea, help the cook prepare late dinner, carry up the dishes for late dinner, clear and wash up kitchen supper. The nurse has her dinner in the kitchen. Servants' meals should be breakfast, before the family, dinner directly after upstairs lunch, tea at five, supper at nine. They should go to bed regularly at ten o'clock. Now as to their fare. For breakfast a little bacon or an egg, or some smoked fish; for dinner, meat, vegetables, potatoes, and pudding. ”

“ The horses were fed and harnessed and everything made ready for the start. Ample lunch was put up to last the entire party until they reached their destination, and when breakfast had been eaten the start was made. ”

“ Yet we can not blame children for [Pg 200] disliking the usual school luncheon, which is seldom dainty-looking or inviting to the taste; sandwiches roughly and thickly cut, the bread clumsily buttered, and the meat in chunks instead of slices, cake crumbling and soggy, pickles, and pie that has been wedged into a dinner box for hours, are none of them the proper food for exhausted brains. ”

“ The business man who works very hard through the middle of the day, and has not time to take an elaborate meal, nor time to rest after it so that it may digest easily, takes a light luncheon and makes up for it at breakfast and dinner. The outdoor worker who has a long hard day and expends much energy, takes an hour at noon for a substantial dinner, in addition to a hearty breakfast and supper and sometimes a mid-forenoon or mid-afternoon lunch. ”

“ Shooting luncheons—Cold tea and a crust—Clear turtle—Such larks!—Jugged duck and oysters—Woodcock pie—Hunting luncheons—Pie crusts—The true Yorkshire pie—Race-course luncheons—Suggestions to caterers—The “Jolly Sand boys” stew—Various recipes—A race-course sandwich—Angels’ pie—“Suffolk pride”—Devilled larks—A light lunch in the Himalayas.
There is no meal which has become more “expanded” than a shooting luncheon. ”

“ A joint of meat, a fruit tart or stewed fruit, or a suet or milk pudding, constitute the luncheon of many who dine late, more especially when the household includes children who share the midday meal. Or the luncheon may consist of the cold remains of the previous night's dinner, in which case parts of birds, tarts, creams, jellies, etc., are usually made more presentable by being cut into portions suitable for serving, and neatly arranged on a dish. ”

“ This meal, called lunch, is with the English quite an institution, being apparently a less elaborate and ceremonious dinner. Every thing is placed upon the table at once, and ladies sit down without removing their bonnets ”

“ Such gross food is only fit for a man.”
The school-girl, rising from a barely-tasted breakfast during which she has been saying over to herself the chronological table, or French verb, learned the night before,—“doesn’t care to take any luncheon with her to-day. Certainly, no bread-and-butter—and sandwiches are hateful! If you insist, mamma, just give me a piece of pie—mince-pie, if you have it, with a slice of fruitcake and a little cheese. ”

“ A luncheon served for only one or two may be just as dainty as the most formal function, and far more satisfactory. A napkin or a carving cloth, spread on the bare table, is all sufficient when time is of great value. A poached egg on a bit of buttered toast, a tomato, made more savory by a spoonful of mayonnaise, a cup of tea, and some simple dessert, is a wise luncheon, if time be taken to serve and eat it properly. A glass of milk and a piece of cake, taken standing by the refrigerator, is a foolish luncheon, no matter who does it. ”

“ The only extra plates ever permitted are the bread and butter plates which are put on at breakfast and lunch and supper above and to the left of the forks, but never at dinner. ”

“ The menu for luncheon consists usually of soup, fruit, lobster in cutlets or croquettes, with mushrooms, or omelet, or fish; broiled chicken, or lamb chops, with green peas and potatoes; a salad, crackers and cheese; ice cream, with coffee, tea, or chocolate. [149]
At a breakfast or luncheon, as at a dinner, every effort should be made to be punctual. The success of such an occasion may be ruined by a tardy guest. ”