When you’re a kid, you have no idea if your parents are rich or poor. Our family, it turns out, wasn’t particularly either, which meant we didn’t go without, but with nine kids running around there were plenty of hand-me-down clothes and cheap, filling meals that would horrify a modern-day nutritionist.
One of our mum’s go-to foods was luncheon sausage, a compressed tube of left over animal bits and whatever else was at hand that day in the factory. She’d grab a packet of white bread from the cupboard, slather slices of it with butter and a slab of this stuff, and rapidly assemble a joyous, teetering skyscraper of sandwiches for her hungry babies. We wolfed them down like little savages.
Who needs real food when you have luncheon sausage in the fridge?
I was put in mind of this when a colleague who’s never short of a witty nugget or two recently posted a charming lunchtime selfie with a mate in one of Auckland’s funkier food establishments, saying “now that was a meaningful lunch!”
If you ask me, Hutch, every lunch is meaningful. And the more wine is involved, the more meaningful it becomes.
That may not have always been so. According to etymonline, until 1817 Webster’s dictionary defined lunch merely as “a large piece of food”. That definition is now obsolete, but it may tell us something about people’s eating habits - in Britain at least - before that time.
During the Middle Ages, what you and I call lunch was called dinner. It was the biggest meal of the day and came after people had put in a few hours of hard slog already. By the 1600s, says Wikipedia, that meal could take place any time from late morning to mid-afternoon.
As the years progressed, the timing of dinner kept getting pushed later and later, until some hungry soul - almost certainly one of my direct ancestors - said “bugger this for a game of soldiers, we need another meal to tide us over.” That meal was dubbed “lunch”.
Where the word came from is uncertain. We know it’s a shortening of luncheon, a word that - outside of names like luncheon sausage - is used only by royalty when inviting their coiffed and perfumed friends to the palace for a midday repast. OED says the first known use of lunch as a noun is from Middle English, a period from 1150 to 1500. An English-Latin dictionary (for children!) published in 1440 records the word. Called the Promptorium Parvulorum (“Storehouse for Children), the book was so popular that it ran to repeated printings right through to the 19th century, by which time its title had been extended to Promptorium Parvulorum Sive Clericorum (“Storehouse for Children or Clerics”). How clerics felt about this is unknown, but one imagines they weren’t especially flattered. Today, the book remains an important reference for anyone studying Middle English.
Different cultures feel differently about lunch. In Spain, where it’s called almuerzo, lunch is often the largest meal of the day and is eaten from about 2pm. Many Middle Eastern countries feel the same way, so maybe hot weather has something to do with it. The Japanese call lunch hirugohan and are not afraid of throwing in items that to my meek western palate would be daunting even at dinner.
Of course you’re not a modern western citizen if you’ve never brunched with friends. Brunch is a portmanteau word, a combination of words scrunched together to form a new word whose meaning is somehow a combination of the two. Smog, for example, is a smushed version of smoke and fog. For all its contemporary connotations, however, brunch dates back to 1896, when it was coined by waggish British students. They were cleverer than us in those days too, drawing a distinction between brunch, which was closer to breakfast than lunch, and blunch, which was closer to lunchtime.
One of my favourite books of poetry is Lunch Poems by New York poet Frank O’Hara. Published in 1964, it was commissioned by fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti five years earlier. As O’Hara continually dragged the chain on providing a completed manuscript, Ferlinghetti took to chasing him with questions like “How about lunch? I’m hungry.”
The book’s title also bears witness to O’Hara’s practice of dashing off poems during his lunch hour and whenever else he could find time. One of his most famous poems, a tribute to actress Lana Turner, was scribbled on the Staten Island ferry on the way to deliver a joint poetry reading with Robert Lowell. Before O’Hara read the poem to the audience, he told them how it had been written. When it was Lowell’s turn to read, this rather self-important man huffily apologised for not having written a poem on his way to the reading, informing them that his pieces had taken rather more time and effort.
O’Hara is one of my heroes. I first encountered his poetry as a 21-year-old who’d been raised on a diet of Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas. My idea of poetry was that it had to be profoundly moving and even more meaningful than a booze-fueled lunch. O’Hara and others (Kenneth Koch, William Carlos Williams and John Ashbery, mainly) weren’t having any of that. They were interested in surfaces; everyday experiences captured as keenly as possible in language that made no attempt to sound elevated. It cracked open something that continues to inform me as a writer and for which I’ll always be grateful.
My gratitude extends beyond the poets themselves. The university course in which I found them was led by two great teachers, Roger Horrocks and Wystan Curnow. They had the priceless ability - and wisdom - to resist telling us what to think, and instead offered suggestions to help us find our own way into the poems we were reading. As a result, each of us discovered the poets and their work for ourselves.
Now if you’ll excuse me, all this writing has made me peckish. If I’m not mistaken, it’s time now to powder my wig, don my finery, and engage in a bite of luncheon.
Bits and specious
The Promptorium Parvulorum is believed to have been written by a monk called Geoffrey the Grammarian. He later published another work called the Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, said by Wikipedia to be “the first English-to-Latin wordbook”. My research doesn’t reveal how it varied from his earlier work but one devoutly hopes it did.
The name Kylie was rarely given to anyone outside Australia until the late 1980s, when Kylie Minogue took the world by storm. Its origin is obscure, but it could be an adaptation of an alternative Aboriginal word for boomerang, or it may simply be an Australian reworking of Kyle or Kelly.
Quote of the week
What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?
W. Clement Stone
It seems that people might have been a bit insecure about the informality of the word "lunch"; around 1915, the style guide (more of a just a style sheet of paper, really) for the Kansas City Star newspaper somewhat sternly advised its writers "Say luncheon, not lunch". I guess "lunch" was for the plebs, not for the refined readers of the Star? Anyway, here's the context:
https://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article10632713.ece/BINARY/The%20Star%20Copy%20Style.pdf