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A ploughman's lunch is a cold snack or meal, featuring at a minimum, a thick piece of cheese (usually Cheddar, Stilton, or other local cheese), pickle (often Branston Pickle, sometimes piccalilli and/or pickled onions), crusty bap or chunk of bread, and butter.
It is often accompanied by a green salad; other common additions are half an apple, arugula, celery, pâté, sliced hard-boiled egg or beetroot.
It is a common menu item in English pubs, often shortened when ordering to "a ploughman's".
Familiarity with the ploughman's lunch has led catering companies to describe a sandwich containing Cheddar, pickle and salad as a "ploughman's sandwich."
Etymology
The Oxford English Dictionary dates this phrase dates back to at least 1837, in the book Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott by John G. Lockhart. Until recently, the OED's next citation was only from 1970, indicating a long period of time when the meal was virtually unknown in its native land. It is this long disuse and recent rediscovery that has led some people, such as Richard Eyre, to portray the dish as being a recent invention dressed up as a traditional meal.
In Britain ploughing is usually done during Winter. Before the 20th Century, at that time of year the ploughman’s wife or mother would have been unlikely to include salad in the ploughman’s lunch. Green vegetables would be difficult to get in winter. The real Ploughman's lunch would have more likely consisted of just cheese and pickle. Onions, however were cheap and easily obtainable as were cheese and pickles made earlier. Onions could be cut up raw and included in a ploughman's lunch or pickled onions could be used.
Lexicographer Edwin Radford in To Coin a Phrase (1974) attributes the current usage to Richard Trehane, chairman of the English Country Cheese Council. Nigel Rees too concluded current usage to be 1970s marketing. In 2005, research by Victoria Coren and others for the Wordhunt project traced the origin of the phrase to 1960, with documentary evidence in the form of minutes of meetings of the English Country Cheese Council, together with contemporaneous advertising matter. The new evidence supports Richard Trehane as the inventor of the term. The new citation has been incorporated into the online edition of the OED and will be included in the next revision of the published dictionary.
Richard Eyre directed The Ploughman's Lunch, a 1983 "issues" film whose subtext, according to the BFI, is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present"; the film's title is a metaphor for the rewriting said to have occurred in the aftermath of the Falklands War.
References
- Why Do We Say ...?, Nigel Rees, 1987, ISBN 0-7137-1944-3.
- Ploughman's lunch
External links
- Ploughman's Lunch, from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport tourism website
- OED entry, part of a BBC Wordhunt appeal
- The Ploughman's Lunch film from a BFI website
- Recipe for Ploughman's Lunch
"Ploughman's lunch"