Girls just want to have lunch

[venta]

I'm working from home today, and I've just been overcome by a fit of nostalgia.

Slightly after one I was sitting in the kitchen with a plate of bread, cheese and dates on the table, and a paperback in my hand. And suddenly I was back at home, with my mum, eating little-dinner.

The usual mealtime-model when I was growing up was to have a main meal (dinner) in the middle of the day and a sandwich-based tea in the evening. I got dinner at school, and my Dad was usually working somewhere with a canteen or, at the worst, a pub. Did the mother cook a main meal for herself on the days she wasn't at work ? I have to admit that I'm not sure.

However, sometimes during school holidays, perhaps when Dad was working in a particularly obscure area in the Dales, we'd agree to eat our main meal in the evening. This meant that the mother and I would have little-dinner in the middle of the day - to be followed, of course, by dinner-for-tea in the evening. I remember bread, cheese and dates being a staple of little-dinner; it's still one of my favourite snack-meals, and I've no idea why I don't eat it more often.

I don't know where the name little-dinner came from; lunch was a word which would not enter my vocabulary until I went to secondary school, where we had a lunch hour at 12:45 instead of dinnertime at 12. Maybe it was me, with a toddler's limited word-count, guessing at a name. Maybe it was the mother mucking about and mistranslating petit-déjuner. It's a phrase I've not heard in a long time. Now that I don't live with my parents I don't know if they still have the conversation about whether it would be more convenient to have dinner-for-tea on a particular day.

For some reason I always remember little-dinner as a quiet affair, with not even the radio on. As a family, we are all uncivilised enough to read at mealtimes, so meals often passed in companionable silence. Even when Ladybirds were all I could manage, I remember reading while eating; many of my childhood books have jam-stains on the pages. I was always taught that - like one holds one's knife in one's right hand - bread and so on should be picked up in the left. Even now I instinctively hold a book in my right hand to leave the left free.

So I sat in the quiet kitchen by myself, with my whodunnit and my dates, and had my little-dinner. It's a very civilised way to spend an hour in the middle of the day.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

I forgot to ask, are the dates taken alongside the bread and cheese in one exciting mouthful, or afterwards?

I'd say alongside, usually. Today, though, the cheese was the end of a bit of stilton-with-apricots and so it was afterwards as they didn't go so well together.

I should add that these are dried dates, not the fat, squashy, sticky sort which I associate with Christmas.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

Cheese & dried dates is a favourite snack combo for me... in fact, I might have that as a post-workout snack today. I now have organic goat's Camembert and organic dates in the house, thanks to a Suma delivery this afternoon.