Supper to Dinner and Back Again

As the daughter of a farmer I grew up calling the noon meal “dinner” and the evening meal “supper.” Dad got up early to feed the hogs and milk the cow. He came back to the house for breakfast before heading back out to hitch up Babe and Belle, our big, gentle workhorses and plow fields, cut hay, or harvest corn by hand as the team slowly followed him down the row, pulling the wagon that slowly filled with golden ears.

By noontime Dad needed a serious infusion of calories. He returned to the house to fuel up on a substantial meal such as pan-fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, biscuits, gravy, and, in the summer, sliced tomatoes from his garden. That prepared him for a full afternoon of work that ended only when he had again milked the cow.

It was only right that we ate our dinner in the middle of the day, for “dinner” is defined as “the main meal of the day.”

Only when I was grown up and employed at Hallmark as a greeting card writer did I start calling my midday meal in the employees’ cafeteria “lunch” and my evening meal “dinner,” as all people with desk jobs tend to do.

Then, decades later, when both Dennis and I had retired, I returned to calling our evening meal “supper,” defined as “an evening meal, typically a light or informal one.” That fits our evening repasts to a T.

Supper consists of three items, occasionally only two. Last evening’s supper consisted of bean soup,

cornbread baked in the iron skillet, (that little brown spot is a morsel of bacon)

and salad fresh from the garden.

We still call our morning meal “breakfast,’ which has grown more substantial since we don’t have to rush off to jobs, and we still call our midday meal “lunch,” even when it’s only a smoothie or some guacamole and chips. 

“Dinner” has dropped completely from my vocabulary. Now that we are old and our metabolism has slowed, all of our meals are too spare and simple to merit the name. Frankly, I'm relieved. Not having to make a dinner takes the pressure off the cook It's all in the semantics. Supper is a snap but dinner is a chore.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer