Ploughman's lunch

Ploughman's lunch
	A traditional ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, cheese, cider, and onions.
Alternative names	Ploughman's lunch
Place of origin	United Kingdom
Main ingredients	Bread, cheese, onion, pickle
	Media: Ploughman's lunch ;

Last updated November 14, 2024

A ploughman's lunch is a British cold meal based around bread, cheese, and fresh or pickled onions.^[1] Additional items can be added, such as ham, green salad, hard boiled eggs, and apple, and usual accompaniments are butter and pickle, which in Britain denotes a chutney-like condiment.^[2] As its name suggests, it is most commonly eaten at lunchtime. It is particularly associated with pubs, and often served with beer;^[1] the saltiness of the cheese was noted to enhance the "relish of the beer."^[3]

Beer, bread, and cheese have been combined in the British diet since antiquity, and have been served together in inns for centuries. However, the specific term "ploughman's lunch" is believed to date from the 1950s, when the Cheese Bureau, a marketing body, began promoting it in pubs as a way to increase the sales of cheese, which had recently ceased to be rationed. Its popularity increased as the Milk Marketing Board promoted the meal nationally throughout the 1960s.^[4]

History

Bread and cheese formed the basis of the diet of English rural labourers for centuries: skimmed-milk cheese, supplemented with small amounts of lard and butter, was their main source of fats and protein.^[5] In the absence of access to expensive seasonings, onions were the "favoured condiment",^[6] as well as providing a valuable source of vitamin C.^[7]

The reliance on cheese rather than meat protein was especially strong in the south of the country.^[8] As late as the 1870s, farmworkers in Devon were said to eat "bread and hard cheese at 2d. a pound, with cider very washy and sour" for their midday meal.^[9] While this diet was associated with rural poverty, it also gained associations with more idealised images of rural life. Anthony Trollope in The Duke's Children has a character comment that "A rural labourer who sits on the ditch-side with his bread and cheese and an onion has more enjoyment out of it than any Lucullus".^[10]

While farm labourers usually carried their food with them to eat in the fields, similar food was for a long time served in public houses as a simple, inexpensive meal. In 1815, William Cobbett recalled how farmers going to market in Farnham, forty years earlier, would often add "2d. worth of bread and cheese" to the pint of beer they drank at the inn stabling their horses.^[11] In the 19th century the English fondness for serving cheese and bread with beer was noted, as "the very dryness and saltness heighten thirst, and therefore the relish of the beer".^[3] In the early 20th century, bread and cheese was still the only food available in many rural pubs: in 1932 Martin Armstrong described stopping at village inns for a lunch of bread, cheese and beer, noting that "On these occasions in country inns when bread, cheese and beer seem so extraordinarily good, the alternative is generally nothing; and compared with nothing bread, cheese, and beer are beyond compare".^[12]

While Oxford English Dictionary states the first recorded use of the phrase "ploughman's luncheon" occurred in 1837, from the Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott by John G. Lockhart, this stray early use may have meant merely the sum of its parts, "a lunch for a ploughman".^[13] The OED's next reference is from the July 1956 Monthly Bulletin of the Brewers' Society, which describes the activities of the Cheese Bureau, a marketing body affiliated with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. It describes how the Bureau

exists for the admirable purpose of popularising cheese and, as a corollary, the public house lunch of bread, beer, cheese and pickle. This traditional combination was broken by rationing; the Cheese Bureau hopes, by demonstrating the natural affinity of the two parties, to effect a remarriage.^[14]

By the 1950s, the traditional combination of bread, cheese, beer and onions was certainly being referred to by forms of the name later used to promote it. In 1956, author Adrian Bell reported: "There's a pub quite close to where I live where ... all you need say is, 'Ploughboy's Lunch, Harry, please'. And in a matter of minutes a tray is handed across the counter to you on which is a good square hunk of bread, a lump of butter and a wedge of cheese, and pickled onions, along with your pint of beer". Only a year later, in June 1957, another edition of the Monthly Bulletin of the Brewers' Society referred to a ploughman's lunch using that name, and said that it consisted of "cottage bread, cheese, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, cold sausages and, of course, beer".^[15] The Glasgow newspaper The Bulletin from 15 April 1958^[16] and The Times from 29 April 1958 refer to a ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, cheese and pickled onions.^[17]

The meal rose rapidly in popularity during the 1970s. This has been argued to be at least partially based on a British cultural "revulsion from technology and modernity and a renewed love-affair with an idealised national past",^[18] although it appears the main reasons the ploughman's lunch was favoured by caterers were that it was simple and quick to prepare even for less skilled staff, required no cooking, and involved no meat, giving a potential for high profit margins.^[19]

The film The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present".^[20] The title alludes to the debatable claim that the supposedly "traditional" meal was the result of a marketing campaign of the 1960s devised to encourage people to eat meals in pubs.^[21]

In 2023, Bon Appétit described "girl dinner" as a rebrand of meals based on bread and cheese, such as the ploughman's lunch.^[22]

Related Research Articles

Swedish cuisine is the traditional food of Sweden. Due to Sweden's large north-to-south expanse, there are regional differences between the cuisine of North and South Sweden.

A hamburger, or simply a burger, is a dish consisting of fillings—usually a patty of ground meat, typically beef—placed inside a sliced bun or bread roll. The patties are often served with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, bacon, or chilis with condiments such as ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, relish or a "special sauce", often a variation of Thousand Island dressing, and are frequently placed on sesame seed buns. A hamburger patty topped with cheese is called a cheeseburger. Under some definitions, and in some cultures, a burger is considered a sandwich.

English cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with England. It has distinctive attributes of its own, but is also very similar to wider British cuisine, partly historically and partly due to the import of ingredients and ideas from the Americas, China, and India during the time of the British Empire and as a result of post-war immigration.

A sandwich is a dish typically consisting of meat, cheese or vegetables used as a filling between slices of bread, or placed atop a slice of bread; or, more generally, any dish in which bread serves as a container or wrapper for another food type, and allows it to be a finger food. The sandwich began as a portable, convenient food in the Western world, though over time it has become prevalent worldwide.

Finnish cuisine is notable for generally combining traditional country fare and haute cuisine with contemporary continental-style cooking. Fish and meat play a prominent role in traditional Finnish dishes in some parts of the country, while the dishes elsewhere have traditionally included various vegetables and mushrooms. Evacuees from Karelia contributed to foods in other parts of Finland in the aftermath of the Continuation War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open sandwich</span> Single slice of bread with food items on top

An open sandwich, also known as an open-face/open-faced sandwich, bread baser, bread platter or tartine, consists of a slice of bread or toast with one or more food items on top. It has half the number of slices of bread compared to a typical closed sandwich.

Danish cuisine originated from the peasant population's own local produce and was enhanced by cooking techniques developed in the late 19th century and the wider availability of goods during and after the Industrial Revolution. Open sandwiches, known as smørrebrød, which in their basic form are the usual fare for lunch, can be considered a national speciality when prepared and garnished with a variety of ingredients. Hot meals are typically prepared with meat or fish. Substantial meat and fish dishes includes flæskesteg and kogt torsk with mustard sauce and trimmings. Ground meats became widespread during the industrial revolution and traditional dishes that are still popular include frikadeller, karbonader and medisterpølse. Denmark is known for its Carlsberg and Tuborg beers and for its akvavit and bitters, but amongst the Danes themselves imported wine has gained steadily in popularity since the 1960s.

Dutch cuisine is formed from the cooking traditions and practices of the Netherlands. The country's cuisine is shaped by its location on the fertile Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta at the North Sea, giving rise to fishing, farming, and overseas trade. Due to the availability of water and flat grassland, the Dutch diet contains many dairy products such as butter and cheese. The court of the Burgundian Netherlands enriched the cuisine of the elite in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century, so did in the 17th and 18th century colonial trade, when the Dutch ruled the spice trade, played a pivotal role in the global spread of coffee, and started the modern era of chocolate, by developing the Dutch process chocolate.

South African cuisine reflects the diverse range of culinary traditions embodied by the various communities that inhabit the country. Among the indigenous peoples of South Africa, the Khoisan foraged over 300 species of edible food plants, such as the rooibos shrub legume, whose culinary value continues to exert a salient influence on South African cuisine. Subsequent encounters with Bantu pastoralists facilitated the emergence of cultivated crops and domestic cattle, which supplemented traditional Khoisan techniques of meat preservation. In addition, Bantu-speaking communities forged an extensive repertoire of culinary ingredients and dishes, many of which are still consumed today in traditional settlements and urban entrepôts alike.

Smørrebrød, smørbrød "butter bread" (Norwegian), or smörgås " butter goose" (Swedish), is a traditional open-faced sandwich in the cuisines of Denmark, Norway and Sweden that usually consists of a piece of buttered rye bread, topped with commercial or homemade cold cuts, pieces of meat or fish, cheese or spreads, and garnishes.

Norwegian cuisine in its traditional form is based largely on the raw materials readily available in Norway. It differs in many respects from continental cuisine with a stronger focus on game and fish. Many of the traditional dishes are the result of using conserved materials because of the long winters.

Branston is an English food brand best known for the original Branston Pickle, a sweet pickle first made in 1922 in the village of Branston near Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, by Crosse & Blackwell. The Branston factory proved to be uneconomical, and production was moved to Crosse & Blackwell subsidiary, E Lazenby & Sons in Bermondsey, London, where it invested in new buildings in 1924 and 1926, which remained in use until 1969.

Czech cuisine has both influenced and been influenced by the cuisines of surrounding countries and nations. Many of the cakes and pastries that are popular in Central Europe originated within the Czech lands. Contemporary Czech cuisine is more meat-based than in previous periods; the current abundance of farmable meat has enriched its presence in regional cuisine. Traditionally, meat has been reserved for once-weekly consumption, typically on weekends.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Butterbrot</span> Buttered bread, a German staple food

In German cuisine, Butterbrot is a slice of bread topped with butter. Also known as boterham in Dutch speaking countries, it is still considered Butterbrot or boterham even if additional toppings, such as cheese, spreads, or lunch meats, are added, as long as it begins with a slice of bread with butter.

Lunch is a meal eaten around the middle of the day. It is commonly the second meal of the day, after breakfast, and varies in size by culture and region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pickled cucumber</span> Cucumber pickled in brine, vinegar, or other solution

A pickled cucumber – commonly known as a pickle in the United States and Canada and a gherkin in Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand – is a usually small or miniature cucumber that has been pickled in a brine, vinegar, or other solution and left to ferment. The fermentation process is executed either by immersing the cucumbers in an acidic solution or through souring by lacto-fermentation. Pickled cucumbers are often part of mixed pickles.

Smörgåsbord is a buffet-style meal of Swedish origin. It is served with various hot and mainly cold dishes.

Prison food is the term for meals served to prisoners while incarcerated in correctional institutions. While some prisons prepare their own food, many use staff from on-site catering companies. Some prisons support the dietary requirements of specific religions, as well as vegetarianism. Prisoners will typically receive a series of standard meals per day from the prison, but in many prisons they can supplement their diets by purchasing additional foods, including snacks and desserts, at the prison commissary with money earned from working in the prison or sent by family and friends.

A cheese and pickle sandwich is a British sandwich. As its name suggests, it consists of sliced or grated cheese and pickled chutney, sandwiched between two slices of bread. The bread may be spread with butter or margarine, and the sandwich may include salad items such as lettuce and rocket.

Breakfast, the first meal of the day eaten after waking from the night's sleep, varies in composition and tradition across the world.

References

1 2 Hessayon, The new vegetable and herb expert, 2014, p. 73
↑ Petrini and Watson (eds) (2001) Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition and the Honest Pleasures of Food, Chelsea Green, p.164
1 2 McMichael, George (1883). Notes on the Way through Ayrshire - Parish of Dunlop, accessed 01-04-22
↑ Naylor, Tony (31 March 2014). "How to eat: a ploughman's lunch". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 May 2019.
↑ Thirsk and Clay (eds.) Chapters from the Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume 2, CUP, 1990, p. 216
↑ Fussell, G. E. (1981). The English Countryman: his life and work from Tudor Times to the Victorian Era. London: Orbis. p. 56. ISBN 9780856133350.
↑ Hallam, H. E. (1981). Rural England 1066–1348. London: Fontana. p. 66. ISBN 9780006356073.
↑ Royle, Edward (2012). Modern Britain: A Social History 1750–2011 (3rd ed.). London: Bloomsbury Academic. p. 192. ISBN 9786613479235.
↑ Royle 2012, p. 193.
↑ Trollope, The Duke's Children, 1902, p. 253
↑ Cobbett, "To the Chancellor of the Exchequer", Weekly Political Register, 15 December 1815, 329
↑ Armstrong, "Comparatively speaking", in The Weekend Review v.6 (1932), 128
↑ "ploughman's lunch, n." . Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press.(Subscription or participating institution membership required.); citing Lockhart, J. G. (1837). Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. Vol. 4. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell. p. 161. The surprised poet swung forth to join them, with an extemporized sandwich, that looked like a ploughman's luncheon, in his hand.
↑ Cornell, Martyn (2015). Strange Tales of Ale. Stroud, Gloucs: Amberley Publishing. pp. 17–25, 22. ISBN 9781445648088. the evidence from Adrian Bell, and A Monthly Bulletin, is that bread, cheese and pickles was a genuine 'traditional public house meal' from at least before the Second World War, which had been knocked on the head by wartime rationing of staples such as cheese, and that bread, cheese and pickles was something genuinely consumed by ploughmen – or ploughboys – for their lunch.
↑ Cornell Strange Tales of Ale, p. 23
↑ "The Minister Who Slept on Slag Heaps". The Bulletin. 15 April 1958. It was called a ploughman's lunch and consisted of a chunk of bread, butter, cheese and pickles.
↑ "ploughman (draft revision)". OED Online. Oxford OX2 6DP, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. January 2006. Archived from the original on 8 July 2007. Retrieved 29 April 2009. [1958 Times 29 Apr. (Beer in Britain Suppl.) p. xiv/2 In a certain inn to-day you have only to say, 'Ploughboy's Lunch, please,' and for a shilling there is bread and cheese and pickled onions to go with your pint, and make a meal seasoned with gossip, and not solitary amid a multitude.]{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
↑ Taylor, D. J. (1 October 2010). "State of Emergency: Britain 1970–1974, By Dominic Sandbrook". The Independent. Retrieved 15 April 2013.
↑ Lippert, "The choice is cheese", Hotelier and Caterer, v.22 (1989), 71
↑ Brown, Simon. "Ploughman's Lunch, The". BFI Screenonline. London: British Film Institute. Retrieved 29 April 2009. The subtext of the film is the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present.
↑ Cornell Strange Tales of Ale, pp. 17–25
↑ Francis, Ali (19 July 2023). "Can Everyone Chill With 'Girl Dinner,' Please". Bon Appétit. Retrieved 29 July 2024.

Ploughman's lunch

Contents

History

See also

Related Research Articles

References

Further reading