Supper

Francis Maude was judged to have let the side down by uttering the words ‘kitchen supper’. It was almost as bad, apparently, as having said ‘nursery tea’ — not the language of the people. Yet people do eat supper, and may eat it in the kitchen, not always on their laps in front of the television. If Mr Maude had a proper dinner, it was supposed, he’d have it in the dining-room. In any case, names of meals are notorious social identifiers.

Originally, supper was the last of the day’s meals: breakfast, dinner and supper. Hence the Last Supper, not the Last Dinner. Mr Maude would hardly call the meal in the middle of the day dinner. But since the 19th century, when lunch intruded, there has been a certain freedom to use supper for something later or less formal than dinner.

In 1723, Thomas Hearne noted in his diary somewhat irritably, as usual, that the times of dinner and supper on Shrove Tuesday at St Edmund Hall, always at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. ‘as long as I have been in Oxford’, had been changed to noon and 6 p.m. ‘Nor were there any fritters at dinner,’ he complained. ‘When laudable old customs alter ’tis a sign learning dwindles.’

In his entertaining study Moveable Feasts (1952), Arnold Palmer put his finger on the year that dinner was captured by luncheon: 1839. ‘In 1700 a large part of London took a meal at 2 p.m. and another at 7 or 8 p.m. At present, a large part of London is still doing the very same thing,’ Thomas De Quincey wrote in that year. ‘But the names are entirely changed; the two o’clock meal used to be called dinner, whereas at present it is called luncheon; the seven o’clock meal used to be called supper, whereas at present it is called dinner.