We all know that different cultures have different dining hours. In Seville, many restaurants are packed with families at midnight. The Spanish may be an extreme case, but if you go to a restaurant in Paris before nine in the evening, chances are that your only dining companions will be tourists. The French consider dining at eight in the same light that an American would view booking a table at six in a chic New York restaurant. The reason, of course, is that food rituals are highly symbolic.

But a glance at history tells us that the “proper” dinner hour for elites in a country like England, where records of mealtimes extend back centuries, has varied wildly. In fact, taking the long view, dinner doesn’t really refer to a time of day so much as to a type of meal. We now associate it with the evening meal, except in the case of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes Sunday dinners, which are often served in the afternoon. If we consider the meals of the day to be a planetary system with dinner as the sun, then breakfast, lunch, and supper are smaller planets trapped within its gravitational pull.

At the beginning of the 16th century, aristocrats ate dinner, the main meal of the day, at 11 a.m.! This was followed by a light supper in the late afternoon with numerous snacks throughout the day. Neither breakfast nor lunch had been invented at this time. 

By the mid 17th century fashionable people ate dinner at 1 p.m. A hundred years later it was more common to begin dinner between 3 and 5 p.m. By the mid 18th century the retreating dinner hour prompted the invention of breakfast and a noontime snack. During these years, upper-class Englishmen rose at 8 a.m. and ate breakfast at 10. It was a light, but sociable meal of coffee and toast that never lasted less than an hour, but often continued until 1:00 p.m.  If breakfast finished early, people might have a snack around noon to tide them over until dinner. 

Interestingly, at this time such people considered it “morning” until they had dinner, which meant they said “good morning” to each other until 5 p.m.! 

If you were invited to dinner during the late 18th century, you would be expected to arrive around 3:45 and sit down to eat shortly after 4:30. You would probably remain at the table for four hours or more, whereupon the table would be cleared and port wine and dessert brought in. After an interval where guests could freshen up, tea would be served, which in turn would be followed by a light supper of hot and cold dishes, sweets, fruit and wine served between 10 and 11 p.m. And so the dinner guest who arrived before 4 in the afternoon would not leave before midnight having had dinner, tea and supper! 

In the nineteenth century lunch was invented. As the dinner hour retreated further and further into the evening and breakfast was served earlier, the noontime snack was elaborated into a meal in itself. However, luncheon was often thought to be primarily a meal for women, an association which survives today as the “ladies lunch.”

By the mid 19th century, the fashionable dinnertime was 6 p.m. The theater began at 7 p.m. and so now the post-theater late supper had to be invented! It remains today the sole holdover of the late supper that had been so fashionable in the 18th century. By the mid 19th century, breakfast was earlier, at 8 a.m., and had become the often solitary meal that it remains today. It was however more substantial with eggs and bacon, in addition to coffee, tea and toast.

By the late 19th century, lunch was regularly eaten at 1 p.m. by men as well as women, although the lower classes who couldn’t afford candles and had different work schedules ate dinner earlier, thereby continuing the older pattern of two meals a day.

By the early 20th century, the fashionable lunch hovered between 1:00 and 1:30 p.m., and the dinner hour continued to advance with quiet dinners at home served at 7:30, with dinner parties beginning at 8 p.m. In the 21st century, much is being made in the press about the death of the meal and the great increase of snacking, which is criticized as anti-social and as a cause of obesity. But it should be remembered that the snack is essentially a pre-19th-century form of food consumption. So the culture of snacking is a recycling of the past that fragments the temporal order of the day structured by mealtimes and no doubt will lead to further chapters in the history of dining.

by James Stuart Duncan