Brunch

Part of the Protocol and Meals series
Formal meals
Brunch * High Tea * Dinner
Common meals
Breakfast * Brunch * Lunch * 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 * Formal Four * High Tea

Brunch is a category of meal that usually is eaten between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The meal occasionally has some form of alcoholic drink (typically champagne or a cocktail) as an accompaniment. The word brunch is a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch. Brunch originated in England in the late 19th century and became popular in the United States in the 1930s.

Origin of the word

The 1896 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary cites Punch magazine, which wrote that the term was coined in Britain in 1895 to describe a Sunday meal for "Saturday-night carousers" in the writer Guy Beringer's article "Brunch: A Plea" in Hunter's Weekly.

Instead of England's early Sunday dinner, a postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savory pies, the author wrote, 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", Beringer wrote. "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."

— William Grimes, "At Brunch, the More Bizarre the Better" New York Times, 1998

It is sometimes credited to reporter Frank Ward O'Malley, who wrote for the newspaper reporter

Wikipedia article: Brunch

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