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Hot suppers are now very little in request, as people now generally dine at an hour which precludes the possibility of requiring supper; at all events, not one of a substantial kind.

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

THROUGHOUT the Book of Household Management Mrs Beeton stays pointedly vague on every meal apart from dinner. Breakfast, lunch, and supper are all despatched in a couple of paragraphs, and afternoon tea never gets a mention. Nothing peculiar, though, should be read into Beeton’s haziness. During the nineteenth century the gastronomic shape of the day was changing so fast that it was almost impossible to be definite about who was eating what when.

Over the previous 150 years dinner had become a movable feast, leaving the lesser meals to be added and subtracted around this shifting main event. At the beginning of the eighteenth century you might sit down to dine as early as noon in Scotland and the north where daylight was at a premium, although in fashionable, that is artificial, London 2 p.m. was the more usual time. By the 1780s the quality were now eating as late as 5 p.m. although working people stuck to 1 p.m., opening the way for the class-marking difference of ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’. But whether you took your main meal at noon or six or sometime in between, one thing was certain: by mid evening you were starting to feel hungry again. This was where supper came in: a light meal, often a cold collation (bread and dripping for the workers), which ensured you went to bed drowsily replete.

But by the time Mrs Beeton was writing in 1861 the shape of the day had once again been bent out of shape. Middle-class men now left the house for their place of work early in the morning, not arriving home until 6 p.m. Dinner was correspondingly shifted back to take account of the wanderers’ return. The result, as Mrs Beeton notes, was that there was no longer much call for supper at 9 p.m. since most people, except the neurotically greedy, were still perfectly full from dinner.

There was, however, one context in which supper remained important. If your dining room was small and your budget tight, then inviting a large group to what Mrs Beeton calls a ‘standing supper’ started to look like an attractive alternative to a more formal dinner party. At a standing supper people helped themselves from dishes such as ‘sandwiches, lobster and oyster patties, sausage rolls, meat rolls, lobster salad, dishes of fowls, the latter all cut up’, which certainly saved on servants. What’s more, the custom of displaying all the dishes at once made you look like a more generous host than if one course followed another as was usual with a more formal dinner.

Dinner’s slow shunt backwards inevitably ended up having an effect on the other end of the day too. With men now needing to be at their place of work across town for 9 a.m., the first meal of the day moved forwards to 8 a.m. And instead of the bread, tea, coffee, and possibly chocolate of the eighteenth century, what Mrs Beeton described as ‘that comfortable meal called breakfast’ was now turning into something more substantial. Despite her studied refusal to list ‘a long bill of cold fare’ for breakfast, Beeton does go on to suggest the following hot items: mackerel, herring, haddock, mutton chops, bacon and eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade and butter. Here are the origins of the meal that will become the Edwardian country house breakfast of popular fantasy.

With the two meals of the day now stretched nearly twelve hours apart, that left an awful lot of time to be got through on an emptying stomach. Lunch had made a sketchy appearance during the eighteenth century, but now started to become a permanent event in the timetable of the mid-Victorian household. It was still a scrappy business, though, and Mrs Beeton deigns to give it only one short paragraph and a brief description along the lines of ‘The remains of cold joints, nicely garnished, a few sweets, or a little hashed meat, poultry or game, are the usual articles placed on the table for luncheon.’ It was, after all, a lady’s meal, quite likely to be taken in the nursery where little stomachs could not be expected to last more than two hours or so without a snack. Middle-class men continued to work on heroically without a midday break, hating the way that lunch interrupted concentration and gobbled up time. Meanwhile, servants, like the rest of the working class, continued to take their main meal, their ‘dinner’, in the middle of the day, usually half an hour or so after their mistress had finished her ‘lunch’.