English Farmhouse Meals ca 1950
For those of you who have asked about the confusing terminology of English meals, the fact is that they have shifted constantly in the last century or so and are different in different regions and different classes.
Here’s what a farming family (and I’ll explain that in another post) arranged their meals in the middle of the twentieth century.
6:30 A cup of tea and a biscuit (cookie) before going out to get the work of the day started
9-9:30 Breakfast. More tea, bacon and eggs, or smoked fish, or kidneys, or porridge, or scrambled egg, plus toast, butter and marmalade.
12:30-1:30 Dinner. Meat, potatoes and two vegetables plus a substantial pudding (that is, dessert in American terms). No bread. Water to drink.
5-6 Tea. Well, tea to drink, obviously. A loaf of bread to be sliced and eaten as was in the summer, toasted on a toasting form in front of the fire in the winter, some kind of meat spread, jam, small cakes, bought cookies (biscuits), always a slicing cake. (As children we had dinner at school, an unspeakable meal, and we were quite famished at tea time).
8:30 Perhaps a bit of bread and cheese, toasted cheese and cocoa before going to bed.
THX, Rachel, this daily chronology helps a lot to dispel the confusion about names and timing. With food available five times a day instead of three, one would be less in need of eating to stuffedness.
Rachel, this is almost exactly how my father’s parents took their meals as late as 1997. My grandfather was a head gamekeeper on a country estate in Berkshire and would leave the cottage at 5 to feed his birds following a swift cup of tea. My ‘nan’ would have a full cooked breakfast ready for him and the 2 underkeepers for 830 and a full cooked dinner for them, and often all the unmarried farm labourers as well for 1230. Tea was often quite early – 430ish, particularly in the winter and supper was often be proper cocoa and a piece of cheese before lights outs at 930. Tea was also a special meal because Nan insisted everyone had to wash and change before it – for her I think it signified the end of the working day.
Staying with them in the school holidays seemed then to drag, but looking back it was quite a privilege to catch a last glimpse of a dying way of life.
Interesting to compare this with the current meals and their times that is followed in Kenyan british households – primarily farms:
early am – cup of tea & then farm work
10:00 – very huge breakfast for at least an hour, and then back to farm work
5:00 – tea, with cakes and sometimes sandwiches; back to finish daily chores
8:30 – Main meal of the day
That’s true Kay. And add to that the cold and the very hard work.
Jamie, delighted to have your comment. For us, too, tea was a special meal. My mother changed and put on lipstick. I don’t remember the men in the family changing. But it was definitely the end of the workday in winter because it was dark by 5. Feeding the calves was the last task of the day and that could be done by electric light because their barn was close to the farmhouse. Or the outdoor work day I should say because keeping up the books, the farm diary, planning the cycle of artificial insemination for the dairy, and of rotation for the fields was time-consuming and done largely after the outdoor work was over. During haymaking and harvest in summer, work would continue until the dew or the dark made it impossible.
Diana, thank you. Interesting they skip a midday meal, particularly given that they could work later in the evening year round. But in any case a very different pattern from modern urban households.
The English 1950s farming family meal schedule isn’t so very different from the meal routine followed today in Mexico, particularly among the working class.
6:00-6:30–Desayuno. Coffee, hot milk, or herb tea with pan dulce.
9:30-10:30–Almuerzo. A heavy breakfast with leftovers from yesterday’s comida or eggs, beans, lots of tortillas, coffee and/or soft drinks.
2:00ish-5:00ish–Comida. Usually a large meal with sopa aguada, sopa seca, un guisado, frijolitos, tortillas, postre and/or fruta, with agua fresca, soft drinks, water, and/or coffee.
8:00-9:00–Cena. Hot chocolate, herb tea, or hot milk with a taco of frijolitos con queso, a pan dulce, or a fruit.
English teatime is omitted, but otherwise, it’s comparable.
Cristina, I agree. I think it’s a common pattern with those who need to start manual work early. A drink and something instant to get you going, a real meal after two or three hours of work, another real meal sometime later in the day, and something very light when most Americans and europeans now eat their major meal.
Another meal schedule, this time from Nepal.
Twenty years ago I spent some weeks in a distant farm village in southern Nepal, in the terai near the Indian border, and the meals went like this:
7. drink some tea with left-over chapati from the night before
10. dahlbot (rice with lentil sauce) and pickles
3-4. more tea with other small miscellany
after dark. large meal with dahlbot and meat and vegetables and chapati.
Thanks to Kay Curtis