Brunch

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Part of the Meals series
Common meals
Breakfast · Brunch · Lunch · Tea · Dinner · Supper
Components & courses
Amuse-bouche · Appetizer · Cheese · Dessert · Drink · Entrée · Entremet · Fruit · Main course · Nuts · Salad · Side dish
Related concepts
Banquet · Buffet · Cuisine · Eating · Etiquette · Food

Brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch.[1] The term is a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch. Often, it is a heavy meal meant to take the place of both breakfast and lunch. While common in the United States and Canada, according to Punch magazine, the term was introduced in Britain around 1896 by Hunter's Weekly, then becoming student slang.[2] Other sources claim that the term was invented by New York Morning Sun reporter Frank Ward O'Malley based on the typical mid-day eating habits of a newspaper reporter.[3][4]

Some colleges and hostels serve brunch, especially on Sundays and holidays. On Sundays, brunch is only brunch after 11 am. A meal at 10 am on a Sunday is technically still breakfast. Such brunches are often serve-yourself buffets, but menu-ordered meals may be available instead of, or with, the buffet. The meal usually involves standard breakfast foods such as eggs, sausages, bacon, ham, fruits, pastries, pancakes, and the like. However, it can include almost any other type of food served throughout the day. Buffets may have quiche, large roasts of meat or poultry, cold seafood like shrimp and smoked fish, salads, soups, vegetable dishes, many types of breadstuffs, and desserts of all sorts. Mimosas, Ramos gin fizzes, brandy milk punches, Bellinis, and bloody marys are popular brunch cocktails.

The dim sum brunch is a popular meal in Chinese restaurants worldwide.[5] It consists of a wide variety of stuffed bao (buns), dumplings, and other savory or sweet food items which have been steamed, deep-fried, or baked. Customers select small portions from passing carts, as the kitchen continuously produces and sends out more freshly-prepared dishes. Dim sum is usually eaten as a mid-morning, midday, or mid-afternoon teatime.

Contents

Special occasions

Brunch meals are prepared by restaurants and hotels for special occasions, such as weddings, Valentine's or Mother's Day.

Although brunch can be served any day of the week, it has become a popular meal on Sundays at restaurants. Indeed, brunch was originally conceived as a Sunday meal:

Instead of England's early Sunday dinner, a postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savory pies, why not a new meal, served around noon, that starts with tea or coffee, marmalade and other breakfast fixtures before moving along to the heavier fare? By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday-night carousers. It would promote human happiness in other ways as well. Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting. It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.
- Guy Beringer, "Brunch: A Plea," Hunter's Weekly, 1895[6]

French language

The Académie française prefers that French speakers do not incorporate English words like brunch into their language, and suggests using the phrase le grand petit déjeuner,[7] "The big breakfast." Despite the wishes of the Académie, the typical French person readily says "brunch." In fact, most French-French dictionaries have an entry for "brunch" but not "grand petit déjeuner," defining brunch as a "meal taken late in the morning, in place of both breakfast and lunch."[8]

The Office québécois de la langue française accepts "brunch" as a valid word but also provides a synonym déjeuner-buffet. Note that, however, in Quebec, déjeuner alone (without the qualifying adjective petit) means "breakfast".[9] In Quebec, the word—when Francized--is pronounced [bʁɔ̃ʃ], whereas in France, [bʁœ̃ʃ].[10]

German language

German-speaking countries readily adopt Anglicisms, and "brunch" is no exception, defining it as "a combination of breakfast and lunch."[11] However, the German language has/had its own word for "brunch": the nowadays obsolete or at least outdated Gabelfrühstück (literally, "fork breakfast").[12][13]

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://web.foodnetwork.com/food/web/encyclopedia/termdetail/0,7770,667,00.html foodnetwork
  2. ↑ Online Etymology Dictionary
  3. ↑ "As to who coined the word brunch, that, too, is unclear. According to an American Dialect Society site, Frank Ward O'Malley, an old style reporter with the New York Morning Sun (1906-1919), was the first to use "brunch" to describe the morning newspaper man's breakfast-luncheon combination." Mother's Day and the history of "Brunch" - Thousands of Ontarians take their mothers to brunch on Mother's Day Travel TV
  4. ↑ Pietrusza, David Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Google Books link 2007
  5. ↑ Dim Sum - History, Pictures, Recipes of Chinese Dim Sum
  6. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/08/dining/at-brunch-the-more-bizarre-the-better.html?sec=travel&pagewanted=1 Grimes, William. "At Brunch, The More Bizarre The Better." The New York Times. July 8, 1998.
  7. ↑ Anglicismes et les mots préférés
  8. ↑ Dictionaire Général pour la maîtrise de la langue française la culture classique et contemporaine, p. 219, Larousse (1993)
  9. ↑ Office de la langue française, 1999, 'Le Grand Dictionnaire, entry "Brunch": "Repas combinant le petit déjeuner et le repas du midi, et habituellement constitué d'un buffet". (A meal that combines the breakfast and lunch and usually consists of a buffet.)
  10. ↑ La Petite Larousse (2009), p. 140
  11. ↑ de:Brunch Deutsch Wiki entry on "brunch"
  12. ↑ de:Zwischenmahlzeit Deutsch Wiki entry and redirects, Zwischenmahlzeit, Frühmi (a portmanteau of Frühstück and Mittagessen, breakfast and lunch) and Gabelfrühstück
  13. ↑ Cassell's German-English English-German Dictionary, MacMillan Publishing Company