Timing and Linguistic Indicators Dinner/Tea/Supper Rules

What do you call your evening meal? And at what time do you eat it?

If you call it ‘tea’, and eat it at around half past six, you are almost certainly working class or of working-class origin. (If you have a tendency to personalize the meal, calling it ‘my tea’, ‘our/us tea’ and ‘your tea’ – as in ‘I must be going home for my tea’, ‘What’s for us tea, love?’ or ‘Come back to mine for your tea’ – you are probably northern working class.)

If you call the evening meal ‘dinner’, and eat it at around seven o’clock, you are probably lower-middle or middle-middle.

If you normally only use the term ‘dinner’ for rather more formal evening meals, and call your informal, family evening meal ‘supper’ (pronounced ‘suppah’), you are probably upper-middle or upper class. The timing of these meals tends to be more flexible, but a family ‘supper’ is generally eaten at around half-past seven, while a ‘dinner’ would usually be later, from half past eight onwards.

To everyone but the working classes, ‘tea’ is a light meal taken at around four o’clock in the afternoon, and consists of tea (the drink) with cakes, scones, jam, biscuits and perhaps little sandwiches – traditionally including cucumber sandwiches – with the crusts cut off. The working classes call this ‘afternoon tea’, to distinguish it from the evening ‘tea’ that the rest call supper or dinner.

Lunch/Dinner Rules

The timing of lunch is not a class indicator, as almost everyone has lunch at around one o’clock. The only class indicator is what you call this meal: if you call it ‘dinner’, you are working class; everyone else, from the lower-middles upwards, calls it ‘lunch’. People who say ‘d’lunch’ – which Jilly Cooper notes has a slightly West Indian sound to it – are trying to conceal their working-class origins, remembering at the last second not to call it ‘dinner’. (They may also say ‘t’dinner’ – which confusingly sounds a bit Yorkshire – for the evening meal, just stopping themselves from calling it ‘tea’.) Whatever their class, and whatever they may call it, the English do not take the middle-of-the-day meal at all seriously: most make do with a sandwich or some other quick, easy, single-dish meal.

The long, lavish, boozy ‘business lunch’ is nowadays somewhat frowned upon (more of that American-inspired puritanical health-correctness), which is a great shame, as it was based on very sound anthropological and psychological principles. The giving and sharing of food is universally known to be one of the most effective forms of human social bonding. Anthropologists even have a special jargon-word for it: ‘commensality’. In all cultures, the offering and acceptance of such hospitality constitutes at the very least a non-aggression pact between the parties – you do not ‘break bread’ with your enemies – and at best a significant move towards cementing friendships and alliances. And it is even more effective if the social lubricant of alcohol is involved.

You would think that the English, with our desperate need for social ‘props and facilitators’, not to mention ways of detracting from the inevitable awkwardness of money-talk, would seize upon and embrace this tried-and-tested tradition. And indeed, I am convinced that the current misguided disdain for the business lunch is, to borrow a term from the environmentalists, ‘unsustainable’, and will prove to be a temporary aberration. It does, however, provide further evidence to support my argument that the English generally do not take food seriously, and in particular that we grossly underestimate the social importance of sharing food, of eating together – something most other cultures seem to grasp instinctively.

In this respect, the middle-class ‘foodies’ are often no more enlightened than the rest of us. Their obsessive focus on the food itself – the fruity virginity of the cold-pressed olive oil, the gooey ripeness of the unpasteurized Brie de Meaux – is often curiously devoid of the human warmth and intimacy that should be associated with its consumption. They claim to understand this social dimension, waxing lyrical and misty-eyed about the conviviality of mealtimes in Provence and Tuscany, but they have an unfortunate tendency to judge their English friends’ dinner parties, and restaurant lunches with business contacts, on the quality of the cooking rather than the friendliness of the atmosphere. ‘Well, the Joneses are very nice people and all that but really, they have no idea – overcooked pasta, boiled-to-death vegetables, and God knows what that chicken thing was supposed to be . . .’ Their patronizing and sneering sometimes makes one long for the old, pre-foodie-revolution days, when the upper classes considered it vulgar to make any comment at all on the food they were served, and the lower classes defined a good meal as a filling one.