Ploughman's lunch

Ploughman's lunch
Meal
A Ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, butter, sliced onion, wedges of cheese, and ale
Place of origin:
United Kingdom
Creator(s):
Cheese Bureau
Main ingredient(s):
Bread • cheese • pickle
Recipes at Wikibooks:
Ploughman's lunch
Media at Wikimedia Commons:
Ploughman's lunch

A ploughman's lunch (abbrev. to ploughman's) is an English cold meal which consists of cheese, chutney, and bread.^[1] Additional items such as boiled eggs, ham, and pickled onions may be added. As its name suggests, it is more commonly consumed as a midday snack.

Beer, bread, and cheese have been paired in the English diet since antiquity. However, the specific term "ploughman's lunch" is believed to date no further back than the 1950s, when the Cheese Bureau began promoting the meal in pubs as a way to increase the sales of cheese, which had recently ceased to be rationed. Its popularity increased as the Milk Marketing Board promoted the meal nationally throughout the 1960s.

Origins and etymology

Pierce the Ploughman's Crede (c.1394) mentions the traditional ploughman's meal of bread, cheese and beer. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the first recorded use of the phrase "ploughman's lunch" as 1837, from the book Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott by John G. Lockhart, but this stray early use may have meant merely the sum of its parts, "a lunch for a ploughman".^[2]

The OED's next reference is from the July 1956 Monthly Bulletin of the Brewers' Society, which describes activities of the Cheese Bureau. It describes how the Bureau:

exists for the admirable purpose of popularising cheese and, as a corollary, the public house lunch of bread, beer, cheese and pickle. This traditional combination was broken by rationing; the Cheese Bureau hopes, by demonstrating the natural affinity of the two parties, to effect a remarriage.^[3]

This implies that a "traditional combination" of bread, beer, cheese, and pickle was popular before rationing in the United Kingdom (during and after World War II). In 1956, author Adrian Bell reported: "There's a pub quite close to where I live where ... all you need say is, 'Ploughboy's Lunch, Harry, please'. And in a matter of minutes a tray is handed across the counter to you on which is a good square hunk of bread, a lump of butter and a wedge of cheese, and pickled onions, along with your pint of beer".^[3] Only one year later, in June 1957, another edition of the Monthly Bulletin of the Brewers' Society, referred to a ploughman's lunch using exactly that name, and said that it consisted of "cottage bread, cheese, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, cold sausages and, of course, beer".^[3] The Glasgow newspaper The Bulletin from 15 April 1958^[4] and The Times from 29 April 1958 refer to a ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, cheese and pickle.^[5]

The meal's rise in popularity during the 1970s has been argued to be at least partially based on a British cultural "revulsion from technology and modernity and a renewed love-affair with an idealised national past".^[6]

The 1983 film The Ploughman's Lunch, from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present".^[7] The title is a reference to the way the supposed traditional meal was apparently used as way to get people to eat meals in pubs.^[3]

See also

• Food portal
• Branston (food)
• English Cheese

References

Further reading

• Why Do We Say ...?, Nigel Rees, 1987, ISBN 0-7137-1944-3.

Wikibooks Cookbook has a recipe/module on Ploughman's lunch