Whatever happened to supper? Are you familiar with it? Is it the main meal of the day? Or is dinner the main meal? What’s the difference between supper and dinner?
If you grew up in the South, you can probably recall your grandparents using the term “supper.” Apartment Therapy‘s Nancy Mitchell, a native Southerner, wrote, “At grandma’s, dinner happened at noon and there was another meal, supper, in the evening … until very recently I chalked this up as one of those South vs. North things.”
Is it a Southern thing? Not really. It’s more of a farming thing but because Southern and Midwestern states relied on an agricultural economy in the past (whereas the Northeast was more industrialized), having “supper” in one’s vocabulary is associated with those regions.
During the 1700s and 1800s, most Americans consumed their biggest meal of the day around noon, with a lighter meal in the evening. This goes along with the definition of dinner, which is, according to Dictionary.com, the “main meal of the day, taken either around midday or in the evening.”
Many people who grew up in the American South and/or on farms traditionally ate larger meals at noontime to give them the strength to keep working through the afternoon. Supper stems from the word “to sup,” which just goes to show that even back then, country folks loved their slow-cooker recipes: Many farming families would have a pot of soup cooking throughout the day and would eat it in the evening.
In other words, they would ‘sup’ the soup.
The largest meal began staking its claim on evenings when more Americans were working outside the home and farm, so they couldn’t readily return home to cook and eat in the middle of the day.
And thus, dinner usurped supper, leaving us younger generations wondering why our elders had a confusing habit of calling lunch by its successor’s name.
Is it dinner time yet?
