Endless Debates
Is It Supper, Dinner, Tea, or What!
The riddle solved once and for all
Tea and Dinner
I was brought up in Leeds in the North of England to working-class parents of Scottish heritage.
Growing up, our evening meal was called tea. And consisted of sausage and beans. (Or fish fingers and beans, egg and beans, or chips and beans — and I know what you’re thinking!)
Dinner was at lunchtime, when we were fed at school by dinner ladies doling out giant ladles of stew and potatoes.
As my parents got richer in the mid-80s and veered into middle-classdom, dinner became lunch, tea turned into dinner, and we had breakfast, lunch and dinner like everyone else.
Even the traditional English tea-break was eventually replaced by the more fashionable coffee-break.
Supper, though, remained supper.
Supper
Historically, supper, from the French Souper, was simply a secondary meal at some point in the evening — Prendre le repas du soir.
In the UK, however, if there’s one word in the British lexicon that defines your class, it’s supper.
I once had a girlfriend from a well-to-do London family. It was a brief romance but an education all the same. Dinner was no longer dinner, suddenly it was supper.
When I went back up North after the relationship collapsed, and used the word supper with my friends, I was almost kicked out of town. Where I was from, the word supper was strictly reserved for children: a glass of milk/cocoa and a biscuit before bedtime. It was never used to denote an evening meal.
Even today, using the word supper instead of dinner (or even tea) in certain parts of the UK, won’t make you many friends. As it still conjures up images of snobs down south eating oysters and canapés, while everyone else makes do with beans and egg!
Who said the British class system was dead —
Meal Times
I once lived in Andalucia with some Spanish students. We had lunch at three and dinner at ten. When we went out partying on the weekends, we didn’t leave the house until twelve midnight, and generally got back at about eight in the morning, ready for chocolate con churros! Venga!
When I returned to the UK to live with my parents (briefly), I suffered from cultural jet-lag as my father was still eating his dinner at six when I was used to eating at ten.
‘TEN!’ my father boomed. ‘I’m in bed by ten!’
Ten is too late, I agree. But six is too early.
I compromise — I eat at eight. And after I’ve eaten, that’s it for me. Dinner for me marks the end of the active day, and I generally spend a good hour eating it at the table, and then read or watch a film.
The only time I might vary from this routine is if I have a late supper if I've been out.
The Late Supper
For some bizarre reason the word late-supper was acceptable in our household. My father always used the word when he got back late from work, helping himself to bread, cheese, ham and wine for a midnight snack.
Why this was deemed OK, and yet the word supper was off limits, I’ve no idea. Maybe for my father the idea of a late supper rekindled memories of when we were children supping our milk before we went to bed. Or perhaps — and more likely — he considered himself classy enough to use the word supper now he had money.
Either way, it’s a peculiar business all this naming of meals, and the social connotations that come with it, and is something I’ve been thinking about for years. So it’s good to get it off my chest.
Because you never know when you’re going to be eating your Last Supper.
Thanks for reading, for more food for thought, check out:
