Spread out the picnic blanket, sweep out the screen porch, open wide the patio doors: it's the season to be eating outside. While breakfast is typically DIY and dinner connotes a certain degree of preparationānot to mention all the dishes piled into the sink over a long eveningāsummer lunch has a certain romantic simplicity to it. Or at least it could have, if you treat it properlyāthat is, as a casual midday affair not to be sweated over but simply enjoyed in this season of ample sunlight.
In fact, lunch and light are old bedfellows, as least as far as the English language is concerned. The related word luncheon referred to a ālight repast between mealtimes,ā and itself relates to the truly spectacular English nuncheon, or ānoon drinkāāback there and back then, the midday snack involved just bread, but also ale. (Impress friends with this little fact over your next three-martini nunch.)
Lunch is the liminal meal, the casual meal, the light mealāthe one you donāt worry too much over. Samuel Johnson, the British writer and lexicographer, said lunch was āas much food as oneās hand can hold,ā which makes it sound like, if Dr. Johnson lived today, he might be able to close the book on one of our perennial controversies: Is a hot dog a sandwich? Certainly pasties are lunch, if not sandwiches exactly: Theyāre portable, hand-held meat pies that Cornish miners took with them to eat on the job.
That gets to the dark side of lunch: that in the U.S., it was finally formalized as a word and as a meal when people began working outside the home, and couldnāt return to eat at midday. They had to bring their lunch with them, or get a quick snack at diners or Automats, during break times instituted by their employers. Which is to say thatāat risk of leaving you with a bad tasteācapitalism helped invent lunch.
But summer is the least capitalist season, a time to put off productivity a little longer, if you can at all help it. And lunch is a fine way to while away the hours. You can put out a spread of cheese and bread and meat and plenty of fresh vegetables, meze, some sardines perhaps, definitely lots of tomatoes, maybe even a tomato pie. Berries or peaches! Relishes and pickles! Or this new recipe from the Epicurious test kitchen, a dish of gigantic herbed beans, drowning in sauce and begging to be served with crusty bread and cold wine. Try it, and take back your time. Like revenge, lunch is best served cold, or even just at room temperature.
