Etiquetteer was delighted to present “The History of Brunch* and How to Host a Perfectly Proper Pandemic Brunch” to alumni of Northeastern University last week. Today’s column covers the history aspect of this delicious foundation to weekend activities.
A British writer who wanted to drink later on Saturday night without feeling guilty the next morning invented brunch. Guy Beringer suggested in his 1895 Hunter’s Weekly article “Brunch: A Plea” that Life would be more worth living if we could sleep until noon and have a combined meal. “The meal Brunch is one which combines the tea or coffee, marmalade and kindred features of the former with the more solid attributes of the latter. It begins between twelve and half-past and consists in the main of fish and one or two meat courses.”
He also suggests “Brunch is a hospitable meal; breakfast is not. Eggs and bacon are adapted to solitude; they are consoling, but not exhilarating. They do not stimulate conversation. Brunch, on the contrary, is cheerful, sociable, and inciting. It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper; it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow-beings . . . The advantages of the suggested innovation are, in short, without number, and I submit it is fully time that the old régime of Sunday breakfast make room for the ‘new course’ of Sunday Brunch.”
But he added an important PS: “Beer and whiskey are admitted as substitutes for tea and coffee.” Neither of which, you’ll observe, are champagne or vodka. Tastes have certainly changed for the lighter since 1895.
Punch called out Mr. Beringer’s idea as fashionable. But after that the origins of brunch become rather hazy. There are ideas that brunch blossomed out of the British hunt breakfast, or even from wealthy travelers pausing in Chicago between trains on Sunday morning for a meal. In America it was definitely the sort of meal you were more likely to find in a hotel restaurant rather than at home.
Brunch appears in 20th-century etiquette books slowly, not always by name. Emily Post refers to “stand-up breakfasts” by 1937. “Hospitable town dwellers,” we are told by The New American Etiquette in 1941, “may entertain simply and delightfully at Sunday morning breakfasts, served from, say, eleven until two.” Beringer’s original noon start time evolved to make the breakfast aspect of brunch more legitimate.
A few years later Millicent Fenwick wrote in Vogue’s Book of Etiquette: “There are all sorts of breakfasts . . . and pseudo-breakfasts, such as the hunt breakfast, wedding breakfasts and that modern invention with the horrid name of brunch.” [Emphasis Etiquetteer’s.] Mrs. Fenwick got herself in a bunch about “brunch,” but she describes it beautifully: “These pseudo breakfasts follow the traditional English hunt-breakfast arrangements: burners and big covered dishes on the sideboard for hash or scrambled eggs, ham or bacon, sausages, kedgeree or any other such solid foods; a big tray with a coffee urn, sugar, cream, and hot milk.”** Besides coffee, Mrs. Fenwick details whiskey and soda, water and “perhaps a pitcher of orange juice,” suggesting that something many of us consider essential was once optional. “If it is very cold, and everyone has been outdoors a long time, the traditional drink is sherry, served in the living room before everyone goes into the dining room to eat.”
Mrs. Fenwick had clear ideas about the menu, too. “Any sturdy breakfast dish may be served, but it is wise to have a choice of several.” She proscribed porridge and cereal, waffles and pancakes (timing was difficult), and suggested that simple berries or stewed fruit would be more Perfectly Proper than ice cream for dessert.
Thinking about our Basic Brunch Beverages, history suggests that it was Alfred Hitchcock who made the mimosa popular in America during the 1940s. Depending on who you consult, it got started either as the Buck’s Fizz at Buck’s Club in London back in 1921, or in Paris slightly later, in 1924. Or it was an old custom from French wine country that urban bartenders took up and rebranded. The difference is a matter of proportion - the Paris version is equal parts, the Buck’s Fizz uses more champagne. The British Royal Family gets credit for making the mimosa more popular than the Bloody Mary in the 1960s.
The Bloody Mary was also first created in Paris, this time at Harry’s Bar by bartender Fernand “Pete” Petiot. Years later tending bar at New York’s King Cole Bar, he made the drink popular in the States. It was also popular as a hangover cure, much more so than a mimosa. There is little truth to the rumor that it was named in honor of Mary I, famous for her bloody, fiery purges of Protestant heretics.
American society was remade after World War II, with many people flocking to newly-built suburbs away from city centers, and skipping church on Sunday, too. The popularity of buffets exploded in the 1950s and 1960s, the ideal brunch arrangement. In the intervening years, we’ve seen some specific characteristics get established: definitely casual unless for an Occasion, mimosas and/or Bloody Marys, breakfast casseroles, plentiful baked goods, and at least a pretense at a “light” menu. Terence Janericco said in his 1993 The Book of Great Breakfasts and Brunches, “Light has become the password for permissibility. If you can say it is light, then you can eat it almost guilt-free.” But the idea of a midday mashup meal with booze has also led to the dim sum brunch, the drunk brunch (Heaven help us) — and for the festively inclined, the pajama brunch.
However you choose to brunch, enjoy it with Perfect Propriety!
*It’s worth noting that, when researching brunch history on the Internet, everyone from Great National Publications on down to Etiquetteer ends up at this 2008 post on the defunct Brunch Historian blog. Everyone.
**Tea drinkers, note that you are not accommodated in traditional brunch arrangements.