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By JEFFRSON WEAVER
Staff writer
One of my Yankee friends (I have several, believe it or not) came to me for advice a while back (again, believe it or not, some of the smarter ones do that). He had been invited to come to Sunday dinner by the family of a young lady he was courting. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what dinner entailed.
He is a classic city-feller, by the way. Dinner, to him, is an evening meal. I had to explain that in the South, dinner is only an evening meal in some circumstances, when it generally is a more formal affair than supper.
As soon as I saw the confusion in his eye, I figured it was time to once again perform the public service of explaining the difference among breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper.
Since I refuse to recognize the existence of any meal called “brunch,” I won’t worry about that meal. I figure it’s the same thing as a late breakfast or an early dinner (or lunch), and was mainly created by people too lazy to get up at a decent hour to eat. Having been to one or two brunches during my time, I also strongly suspect it was created to give people an excuse to drink in the morning, as if fishing wasn’t enough of an excuse.
But I digress.
As a note of qualification, I must admit that I am the first of my family to be born in North Carolina. Hence, I grew up in a household of displaced Virginians (displaced by the Yankees who have taken over the Old Dominion and are slowly, inexorably moving this way). While true Virginians are Southerners, and I have always considered myself a North Carolinian, my parents never quite were able to make the whole cultural switch.
Therefore, when it came to meals, I was always trapped in between. Yes, Virginians ate lunch and dinner, but some also ate dinner or lunch, and supper. What makes it worse is that my mother came from a farming and fishing family, while the Old Man came from the “right” side of the tracks.
Considering how often I was confused, I can see why it might be frustrating to a Yankee. I just handled the problem by eating everything that was put in front of me, regardless of the time of day, but my appetite is a column for another day.
It took a lot of research and many bologna sandwiches, peanuts, ice-cold country store Pepsi-Colas, Moonpies, Bright Leaf Hot Dogs, and handmade burgers to finally come up with what I consider a reasonable compromise on the semantics of supper versus dinner.
So for all you folks who talk funny and show up at six o’clock for what everyone knows is a midday meal, take note.
Lunch is a roughly noontime meal which does not require the use of utensils, and is often eaten away from home. Such things as sandwiches, leftover fried chicken, collards and biscuits, salt fish, and Vienna sausages qualify. I know a pocketknife is required to eat Viennas, but I don’t consider a pocketknife a proper table utensil.
Lunch can be purchased from a diner, a country store, or brought from home. It can even be purchased in some types of restaurants. I do not consider the neon-laced purveyors of artificial food to be appropriate places to seek lunch.
Dinner, on the other hand, can come in several forms. There’s the midday, weekday dinner, so familiar and now rare in most households. My mother cooked regular dinners when she knew my father would be home at midday; her younger years were spent on a farm, and she knew a working man needed fuel for the rest of the day.
Dinner might be composed of some kind of meat, a side or two, rolls, bread or biscuits, and a light dessert. When Mom went back to work, dinner quickly became replaced by lunch.
Then there are the various kinds of special dinners. These are meals held at churches, political rallies, fire stations and the like. They can be held anytime of the day when one would most likely eat whatever will be served.
A most special kind of dinner is the covered dish dinner as held by many churches. I am sure that meals in Heaven will be served on a long table, with a hodgepodge of Tupperware and mismatched dishes covered in tin foil, with another long table filled with desserts. The difference will be that in Heaven, no one will jostle to make sure they get one of the best biscuits.
The aforementioned Sunday dinner is probably the most formal of the daytime meals, and can be the appropriate time for meeting parents of a prospective mate, visiting with old friends, or just enjoying Miss Margaret’s pecan pie. Sunday dinners also help enforce the Biblical injunction to observe Sunday as a day of rest, since a good Sunday dinner leaves one too full to do anything else for the rest of the day.
Now, supper is, in my opinion, the primary evening meal. It can be similar to the aforementioned regular dinner, in either a broader or lighter sense. Supper should be a time when parents and children sit down together to talk, visit, instruct, celebrate, and catch up on each other’s lives. However, I know the classic family supper is about as rare as a whooping crane or an honest politician these days.
But one can have dinner at a time normally associated with supper. This meal, however, is most often eaten away from home, and often requires nicer clothes than one would normally wear whilst eating supper at home with the family after work and school.
In short, if the meal is closer to evening than noon, one goes out to dinner and stays home for supper. This is not to say one can’t have a nice sit-down dinner at home, or go out somewhere simple for supper.
Confused?
Don’t worry about it. Just ask what time you should be there, ask if you can bring anything, and eat hearty. Your hostess will be offended if you don’t clean your plate.
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