A Gentleman's Afternoon Tea
A Gentleman’s Afternoon Tea
Ploughman’s Lunch
a cold lunch served typically including bread, cheese, and pickles
Dragonfly Delights would like to introduce you to a traditional pub meal that dates back to the early 1300’s. When I was researching for our Father’s Day event I found some very interesting facts about this popular English pub food.
A book, Pierce the Ploughman's Crede (c. 1394) mentions the traditional ploughman's meal of bread, cheese, and beer. Bread and cheese had formed the basis of the diet for English rural labourers for many centuries: skimmed-milk cheese, supplemented with a little lard or butter, was their main source of fats and protein. When access to expensive seasonings was not possible, onions were the "favoured condiment", as well as providing a valuable source of vitamin C.
Relying on cheese rather than meat protein was especially strong in the south of the country. As late as the 1870s in Devon, farmworkers were said to eat "bread and hard cheese, with cider very washy and sour" for their midday meal. This diet was associated with rural poverty, but also romanticised rural life. Anthony Trollope in The Duke's Children has a character comment that "A rural labourer who sits on the ditch-side with his bread and cheese and an onion has more enjoyment out of it than any Lucullus".
Ploughmen, like other farm labourers, generally ate their midday or afternoon meal in the fields.
While farm labourers usually carried their food with them to eat in the fields, similar food was for a long time served in public houses as a simple, cheap meal. In 1815, William Cobbett recalled how farmers going to market in Farnham, forty years earlier, would often add "2d. worth of bread and cheese" to the pint of beer they drank at the inn stabling their horses.
The Oxford English Dictionary states the first recorded use of the phrase "ploughman's luncheon" occurred in 1837, from the Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott by John G. Lockhart. The OED's next reference is from the July 1956 Monthly Bulletin of the Brewers' Society, which describes the activities of the Cheese Bureau, a marketing body affiliated with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. 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.”
Suggesting that a "traditional combination" of bread, beer, cheese, and pickle was popular before rationing in the United Kingdom. Rationing was in place during and after World War II. Indeed, many pubs served little else: in 1932 Martin Armstrong described stopping at village inns for a lunch of bread, cheese and beer, noting that "On these occasions in country inns when bread, cheese and beer seem so extraordinarily good, the alternative is generally nothing; and compared with nothing bread, cheese, and beer are beyond compare".
The meal rose rapidly in popularity during the 1970s. This 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", although it appears the main reasons the ploughman's lunch was favoured by caterers were that it was simple and quick to prepare even for less skilled staff, required no cooking, and involved no meat, giving a potential for high profit margins.
The film The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), 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". The title alludes to the debatable claim that the supposedly "traditional" meal was the result of a marketing campaign of the 1960s devised to encourage people to eat meals in pubs.
Fascinating how a poor man’s lunch in the field becomes a popular meal to enjoy at the pub with friends. The foods included have evolved over the years but the base ingredients are there. Bread, Cheese and Beer.
Dragonfly Delights Tearoom is preparing this traditional pub meal for Father’s day, to be served Sunday June 19th at the new local craft brewery here in Brandon, Black Wheat Brewery.
Experience the pub atmosphere that only the UK can offer this Father’s Day.
The gentleman in your life will surely enjoy the pint of locally crafted beer while tasting delicious made breads, cheeses and more that are the main staples of a Ploughman’s Lunch.
Dragonfly Delights Tearoom is carefully sourcing “Made in Manitoba” for all of the ingredients for this event.
A Ploughman’s Lunch will be served Sunday June 19th, 2022
Black Wheat Brewery, 402 10th St, Brandon Manitoba.
Reservations begin at noon and must be made through
Dragonfly Delights Tearoom
204-729-8914
All covid rules and regulations, current on this date, will be adhered to.
