More meal names than hot dinners

Dinner or lunch? Tea, dinner or supper? Ian Cole ponders the terminology

“I STILL have three meals a day: breakfast, dinner and tea!”

So growled irascible Alf in Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year in response to his son’s upper-class girlfriend, who had the temerity to suggest that migrants had helped change Australians’ eating habits.

Well, her target was actually what Australians eat, not the terminology for their meals. But Alf’s vocabulary may have undergone some transformation since the play.

Back at primary school, the break in the middle of the day was always dinner time, as Alf suggests. Even when I was teaching in London, the main break at noon was always dinner time as hot dinners were served. (Not a great place to be doing duty!)

Somewhere along the line the word lunch began to be more prevalent than dinner for the midday break. Cricketers, of course, always had a 40-minute break for lunch at 1pm and maybe for the pretentious in more elevated circles, some may have had luncheon. Also for the sleepyheads on the weekend, the word brunch began to appear.

That brings me to the evening meal. For Alf and myself back in the 1950s and 1960s it was always tea. Somewhere along the line for many, it became dinner, if it wasn’t already so. To whom do we attribute any change? Maybe Katharine Hepburn when she said to Spencer Tracy back in 1967 in the film of the same name, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? So do I therefore have to get with the times and say dinner? OK, yes, people often have dinner parties, whereas tea parties are a bit thinner on the ground. The Mad Hatter had one and, way back, people in Boston had quite a famous one.

But it starts to get confusing. Some in the US and Britain started to call the evening meal supper. For many Australians, supper was and is a cup of tea and a biscuit before bed. And some might say supper is not a recent term anyway, because Jesus and the disciples sat down to their evening meal the night before Good Friday and that became known as the Last Supper. But that may have been Wycliffe’s English translation rather than the exact word from 2000 years ago.

Let’s go to breakfast! It seems that hasn’t changed, although going out for breakfast might have been seen back in the ’50s and ’60s to be pretentious posturing. However, I must admit seeing cafes advertising all-day breakfasts is great.

But back to Alf and his son’s girlfriend. She seems correct in migrants having changed our eating habits with their influx during the 1950s and their later culinary influence.

However, I would have to say, despite all foreign intervention into our diets, there is an Australian eating characteristic that remains unchanged. When a huge amount of cooking is done on night one, we often enjoy on night number two that peculiarly Australian dish with the French name, “Leftovers”.