Making a meal of things

The market research company YouGov has published a report on that most fascinating of sociological subjects, what you call your main evening meal.

The basic answer is that north of the Trent it's tea and south of it dinner, but there are lots of class and other differences beyond that.

As you'd expect, I'm a breakfast dinner, tea man, but Northern people who are trying to sound posher than they actually are occasionally called their midday meal lunch, and in the South there's a tendency for middle-class people to call their evening meal supper, an aping (unconscious or not) of the aristocracy who apparently call a formal evening affair with guests served by the staff dinner, but a simpler meal without guests prepared by the butler for them in their kitchen, rather than the dining hall, supper. Supper to me is a light snack - crisps, cheese, toast - just before bed so I'm not sure what people who call their main evening meal that call it, a late supper maybe.

And then there's brunch, a cooked or cold meal eaten later than breakfast (the only meal name incidentally which everyone can agree on), either in the late morning or early afternoon, although I'd call the former a late breakfast and the latter an early dinner (a name which also extends to so much else: school dinners, dinner money, dinner hour, all referring to the midday meal, whether a hot main meal or a substantial snack such as sandwiches or something cooked on toast).

Afternoon tea falls between meals, ranging from that beverage with biscuits or cake to a more formal event with sandwiches, scones (however you pronounce that!) and even smaller cooked items like crumpets or toasted teacakes (another linguistic minefield), eaten between dinner and tea at around three or four o'clock.

Much of the confusion around this question stems from the fact that originally everyone, of whatever class and whether they lived in the countryside or the city, ate their main meal in the middle of the day and called it dinner, a tradition which persists in schools and was once prevalent in factories with subsidised canteens, especially in wartime (I'm not sure why in the South the name of the main meal has followed it to a much later hour, and in the North become tea, which would once have been a simpler repast between five and seven o'clock). As Christopher Hibbert says about a country house in the early eighteenth century in his 1987 book The English: A Social History 1066-1945:

"Breakfast was served at about half past nine or ten, and usually consisted of tea or chocolate and hot buttered bread, perhaps with cheese, or toast...

Dinner was served at about four or five and supper at ten, though by the early nineteenth century the hour of dinner had moved on to nearer seven o'clock, and luncheon was served as an additional meal in the middle of the day....In simpler homes dinner was still served in the middle of the day, although the provincial family with pretensions might sit down at two or three o'clock".

Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking when I said

I watched a bit of a programme on BBC1 last night in which TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall launched a personal crusade against obesity, starting with a missionary trip to the frozen North (Newcastle-upon-Tyne to be more precise) to shame educate the fat-guzzling plebs there into eating more healthily.

There are of course many serious and overlapping issues when it comes to obesity - the amount of sugar and salt in processed food; the labelling of food by manufacturers and retailers; poverty caused by low wages and benefits making better quality food unaffordable - but the point that he doesn't seem to grasp is one that another upper middle-class, ex-Etonian, George Orwell, highlighted in his classic piece of 1930's social reportage The Road to Wigan Pier, and which came to mind as Hugh hectored the bemused populace of Newcastle through a megaphone:

"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire might enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't...When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'...Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream!...That is how your mind works...White bread-and-marg and sugared tea doesn't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer.."

Later, Hugh drove a van onto a housing estate in one of the poorer parts of the city and tried to tempt its working-class inhabitants with fresh fruit. As Orwell put it later in the same passage, "In London..parties of Society dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping-lessons to the wives of the unemployed...First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money."

A pie and a pint

I've been highly amused by the extensive press and TV coverage of the controversy caused by a pasty winning the British Pie of the Year award.

Although I don't really go in much for the idea of beer and food matching, there is nothing finer than a pork pie and a pint of bitter. So what qualifies as a pie, and what doesn't?

To me, a pie has to be fully enclosed, so a dish topped with a pastry lid isn't a pie, whatever it says on the menu. On the pie/pasty issue, I'm instinctively with those who say that they're two separate things, but I'm not really sure why. It's nothing to do with the filling, sweet or savoury, or whether it's served hot or cold, so maybe it just comes down to the shape.

Beer and sausages

BBC2 is showing a season of programmes about Germany at the moment.

Last night, the TV chef Rick Stein travelled around Northern and Western Germany with his son and popped in to see their relatives in Düsseldorf, Hochheim and Frankfurt (I know I play with words but the programme title Rick Stein's German Bite is a pun too far even for me).

Stein announced at the start of the programme that his mission is to get us thinking about German cuisine beyond beer and sausages. The only problem with that is that beer and sausages are the best thing about a trip to Germany, whether Alt and Rotwurst in Düsseldorf, Kölsch and Blutwurst in Cologne or Helles and Bratwurst in Munich. I must say though that Stein showed remarkably good taste in going to Zum Uerige in Düsseldorf which, along with Im Füchschen, is my favourite Altstadt pub. He also had Schweinhaxe, a massive pork knuckle encased in crackling that has defeated me both times I've attempted to eat one.

Greggs, or the Two Nations

If I had Sky TV, I'd probably watch the new series about Greggs, the North East-based bakery famed for its pasties and sausage rolls.

Greggs: More Than Meats the Pie deserves credit for the title alone. I'm not sure what angle it's taking though. In London, Greggs is seen as a shop only poor people go in and the well-heeled sneer at the basic sandwiches as they pay over the odds for a filled ciabatta. In the North on the other hand, Greggs is where office workers queue up for cheap, tasty snacks. Really, what could be more satisfying as a dinnertime treat than a couple of hot, greasy sausage rolls eaten out of a paper bag?

Guinness crisps

Someone brought me a packet of Guinness crisps back from Ireland this week.

I like Guinness and I like crisps so I'm among those the Diageo marketing team is aiming for with this product. And I did enjoy them, although you can't really tell that they're made with Guinness.

Horsey, horsey – when will it stop?

Like a riderless mount in the Grand National, the so-called horse meat scandal just keeps running and running. The food industry has been pumping products full of fat, sugar and salt for decades, leading to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from heart disease, but the moment they add a bit of harmless horse meat to burgers the media is suddenly up in arms demanding that the Government DO SOMETHING NOW.

In 1855 in Paris, a hundred and thirty-two people, among them the novelist Gustave Flaubert, sat down to a banquet which included horse soup, sausages and roast horse and fillet of horse with mushrooms, accompanied by potatoes fried in horse fat. The event is credited with sparking the French enthusiasm for horse dishes that continues to this day.

I'd have no problem eating horse meat, and as a customer of Burger King I probably already have.