½ Breakfast, ½ Lunch and all about Easter (Mother’s Day too), brunch is actually a pretty good word. An amalgamation of breakfast and lunch, brunch has been in use since the 1890s. Both in definition and practice, it is not a meal that combines foods from both breakfast and lunch into a new meal: experience tells us, brunch leans heavy on the breakfast items, the term refers to a meal that replaces both breakfast and lunch.
As many bad stand up comedians have asked, why not lupper? Two points come to mind: First, thank you Larry David, without you Seinfeld would have been a show about a guy from Queens with a mini-mullet, making unfunny observations about life - I mean what is the deal with the track shoes and sport coat, are you running to a sales meeting? Secondly, not be all factual and stuff over a bad joke - there is no lupper because we currently take our main meal later in the day than our Victorian counterparts. With our evolving eating habits, increasingly nocturnal, means within a few generations we could be search for a word to describe dinner-breakfast.
Some historians feel that brunch began as people found it increasingly difficult to find and fund live in domestics, so that as cooking duties shifted to homemakers, brunch was a leisurely breakfast on weekend days. Other research contends as a heavier meal taken later in the evening, supper displaced the energy/calorie rich food is fuel - noontime dinner of workers and farmers. As a result people were less hungry when they woke, breakfasts became lighter, consisting of fruits and cereals and that brunch became the first meal of the day for an emerging middle class that liked to sleep in on their days off.
Brunch is also a bit odd because it is one of the few occasions where AM drinking is encouraged, mostly in the form of mimosas or Bloody Marys - why 2 oz of vodka becomes socially acceptable when it is served mixed in juice, while a breakfast of Guinness and cereal is just pathetic is unfair, or perhaps very fair. One of my happiest memories of a visit to Spain, was waking up especially early in Valencia and watching workmen eating calamari sandwiches and washing them down with beer before heading off to work. I don’t know how much work they accomplished - all the coffee in the world won’t help you recover from a 2-drink, 2500-calorie morning meal.
Happy Easter.
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