The Luster of the Long Summer Lunch
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 preparation—not to mention all the dishes piled into the sink over a long evening—summer lunch has a certain romantic simplicity to it. Or at least it could have, if you treat it properly—that 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 “light repast between mealtimes,” and itself relates to the truly spectacular English nuncheon, or “noon drink”—back 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 meal—the one you don’t worry too much over. Samuel Johnson, the British writer and lexicographer, said lunch was “as much food as one’s hand can hold,” 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: They’re 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 couldn’t 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 that—at risk of leaving you with a bad taste—capitalism 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.
Saucy Beans and Artichoke Hearts with Feta
Originally Appeared on Epicurious
