The Off Topic Topic

[Sheilbh]

"Have a cuppa" or something like that.

I've been exposed to Southern people so posh they use "supper" for their evening meals and every time I hear it I'm suddenly Arthur Scargill.

[crazy canuck]

Supper is what we commonly call the evening meal.

[Josquius]

How do you refer to the act of drinking tea?

France french push diner to replace supper because they pushed déjeuner to replace it with coffee and croissant. Eventually, they added petit déjeuner.

It did not make it to Québec. It's déjeuner-diner-souper here.

In Switzerland its the same.
My GF approves of the northern way for lining up.
Though they also have gouter as an official thing in between dinner and tea time.

[Richard Hakluyt]

"Have a cuppa" or something like that.

I've been exposed to Southern people so posh they use "supper" for their evening meals and every time I hear it I'm suddenly Arthur Scargill.

Some of my rougher Durham relatives had supper as their main meal on occasion. At about 9pm. I think it depended on shift patterns, one of the traditional NCB shifts (backshift) had you working between about 11am to 7pm, so 8 or 9pm was a good time for the biggest meal of the day.

[Valmy]

Supper is rather old fashioned here. It is almost always

Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner

How or why I have no idea and I am not even aware of much regional variation on that.

[Barrister]

"Have a cuppa" or something like that.

I've been exposed to Southern people so posh they use "supper" for their evening meals and every time I hear it I'm suddenly Arthur Scargill.

"Supper" is posh?

I think I use dinner/supper interchangeably.

[Josquius]

"Have a cuppa" or something like that.

I've been exposed to Southern people so posh they use "supper" for their evening meals and every time I hear it I'm suddenly Arthur Scargill.

Some of my rougher Durham relatives had supper as their main meal on occasion. At about 9pm. I think it depended on shift patterns, one of the traditional NCB shifts (backshift) had you working between about 11am to 7pm, so 8 or 9pm was a good time for the biggest meal of the day.

My family does that if we have tea especially late for some reason, it's not a regular thing.
More normally we did have supper but it's just a snack before bed.

[Sheilbh]

"Supper" is posh?

I think I use dinner/supper interchangeably.

As ever it's all context specific - the Southern and posh bit is what makes it posh. For me, supper was something after the evening meal - so something you might get before bed when you were staying with your nan.

Plus ca change - a Guardian article on it form over a decade ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/03/tea-with-grayson-perry-supper-dinner

On supper specifically - I recognise the Grayson Perry description of it being used in a way to distinguish from and imply the existence of formal dinner ("we're just having supper") - especially because other contributors like Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris) immediately confirm it

Grayson Perry
[...]
Supper, as in "kitchen" or "country", is upper class. It implies that this is just a casual family meal, maybe with close friends. It may involve a simple starter, wine, and cheese and fruit to follow, but would probably not involve a white tablecloth and starched napkins. Supper is elegant sufficiency. It has overtones of Billy Bunter's midnight feasts, Hogarth prints or officers on campaign. The real significance of supper, I think, is that it implies the user is familiar with an altogether grander style of meal held in stately halls, the formal dinner with copperplate invitations, waiters, silverware, port and speeches. The word supper, I think, implies a subtle rebuke to the aspirational classes who are gauche enough to hold dinner parties at home.

Helen Fielding
[...]
Back in London, I find myself using the word "supper" quite a lot, usually to suggest the sort of informal, just-a-bunch-of-incredibly-cool-friends-round-the-kitchen-table soirée I aspire to, with something I've knocked up from the Ottolenghi cookbook. In reality, I'm more likely to spend the evening eating spoonfuls of odd things out of the fridge while watching telly in pyjamas. But at least you don't have to call that anything.

Rachel Johnson
I remember my parents giving dinner parties in Brussels, in the 1970s, during the tragic Ice Storm period of my childhood. My mother would cook. My father would carve, occasionally with an electric knife, like a baby buzzsaw. They divorced when I was 14. I learned from my mother that the best parties have nothing to do with "fine dining" – I have to this day a horror of hushed tones and chinking cutlery – but lots of wine, rowdy guests, and rough peasant food with plenty of things to pick at even after pudding. It's a model I try to follow myself, although for some reason even "kitchen supper" can take three days, not counting all the time one spends convening exactly the right cast, and clearing up. I still do "kitchen suppers", but have long banned "dinner parties" as both exhausting to give and to attend: they're like taking a four-hour exam in someone you don't know and may never see again. I've noticed a new trend, though: often, the host will ting a glass and want guests to sing for their supper, and get a "general conversation going". Being highly competitive and noisy, I enjoy that (the last dinner I went to, we had Stephen Hester talking about banking). If it's in Notting Hill, "kitchen supper, just locals" can be a £200-a-head catered dinner for which the whole mansion is transformed into a souk and there will be at least two household names present as trophy guests. A "country supper" is eight people, something killingly calorific and crumbly out of the Aga, followed by drunken driving through country lanes. No one gets invited to dinner parties any more: that's déclassé thanks to Come Dine With Me. It's always supper, sometimes even "sups", but only if you're really grand. It's at "sups", of course, that you're most likely to get the Lynch-Bages or the PM.

David Lammy
[...]I was first introduced to "supper" at the inevitable visit-your-new-friends-at-their-homes that follows your first term at university. It was more ritualistic than our dinners ever were. Supper was something you anticipated, that you perhaps got changed for. Inevitably, it was a faux pas minefield: multiple courses, a plethora of cutlery and alcohol (which, until then, was something I had only ever had in a park or a pub, never in front of a consenting adult).

This was all new and novel, but it was mundane and stuffy, too. As I've grown older, friends who have "supper" make their children have "tea" with different food, at a different time and on a different table. I don't see the point. I find it hard enough to see my kids as it is, and even harder to make them aware of their Caribbean roots. That's why we have dinner. The four of us sit down at the table and we eat food their grandmother would approve of.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

There is no such thing as a "country supper" in culinary or sociological terms. Or at least there wasn't, until now. What there is, is "supper", the meal that posh(ish) people eat at home most days in the evening – when they are not going out to or hosting "dinner" – a meal of some formality designed to entertain and impress your social peer group. You can invite someone to "supper" and know they will not expect tablecloths or candles or more than perhaps half a dozen guests. They might expect to chat to you in your kitchen, though, while you prepare the meal in question.

Then there is "the country" – not to be confused with "the nation", but a posh shorthand for what might more generally be described as "the countryside". It means anywhere with more fields and hedges than streets and lamp-posts. It's a word used in such sentences as "I live in the country, but I have a flat in London", or "I live in London, but I have a cottage/farm/stately home in the country."

To me, therefore, the term "country supper" is specific. It can be meaningfully used only by and between people who regularly eat "supper" in each others' houses, and have (at least) two residences, one in a rural location. (Though, being a Devon man, I'd call Chipping Norton suburban. Or at best "home counties".) On that basis, although "country supper" is a hot buzz-phrase right now, I doubt it will permanently enter the lexicon of either gastronomy or class analysis.

I know all this, of course, because I am reasonably posh myself – and if there really was such a thing as a "country supper", I would expect to have been invited to one.

Bee Wilson

In 18th-century London, supper was posh: an insubstantial final snack eaten by the upper classes long after dinner – cold beef and punch, perhaps, nibbled to sate the appetite before bed. But growing up in the 1980s, supper wasn't grand. It was just what we called the seven o'clock meal, whether it was toad in the hole, cottage pie or that exciting new discovery, the M&S ready meal.

I'm not sure why we called it supper rather than dinner or tea. Our Oxford household was thoroughly middle class, but also eccentric, very bookish and Anglican; the Last Supper was much discussed. My mother was a Shakespeare scholar, so she may have been talking in Elizabethan English when she called us in for supper: "Men sit down to that Nourishment which is called Supper", as it says in Love's Labour's Lost. Or it could have been an affectation from my grandmother, who tried hard to shrug off her roots in a Devon post office, referring to "the drawing room" and going so far as to ennoble Marmite with a French pronunciation: to her it was always "Mar-meet". She would never have dreamed of calling the evening meal "tea", which meant small cakes and china cups at four.

Personally, I don't find "supper" snooty. It is only when you add an adjective that it becomes pretentious: country supper and kitchen supper are both phrases used by people like David Cameron, who normally eat dinner, but are slumming it. My husband's family, much posher than mine, always eats dinner, implying candles and several delicious courses at 8pm. The joy of supper, by contrast, is that it carries no particular expectations besides nourishment. It could be anything from fillet steak to poached eggs and Mar-meet toast. Supper is simply the comforting end point to which the whole day has been leading.

Jeanette Winterson
[...]
I love suppers with friends. Is there a class thing? Yes, for sure, but if you are a writer or an artist of any kind, you can avoid class. You can mix wherever you want to and say what you like. That helps. I have to say, though, that the best dinner party I ever went to was thrown by an eccentric member of the Guinness family in a crumbling house in Dublin. The dining room hadn't been decorated since 1840 and, as the room was colder than the fridge, we left the champagne out to chill. Food was cooked on a burner of the kind road-menders use to melt tarmac. I was sitting next to Neil Jordan and we both ate in silence until we had eaten enough to be able to speak.

(Rather dubious on the idea that writers and artists can avoid class too )

[Bauer]

After eons away from here I suddenly remembered that I created this in a past life

 

[The Brain]

 

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

[HVC]

The mormons have him now.