Summer supper: corn, fried squash, carrot salad, cucumbers, tomato, and cornbread.
Dinner—The meal eaten at mid-day.
Supper—The evening meal.
—Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food Recipes & Stories from Mountain Kitchens written by Jim Casada and Tipper Pressley
Jim and I added a section of food related vocabulary words to our cookbook to explain the terms used throughout the book and to help keep the usages alive for future generations.
People are often confused by my use of the words supper and dinner in my videos. When I was growing up we had breakfast, dinner, and supper. If we were at school we called dinner lunch and when I worked a public job I called the midday meal lunch, but it was always dinner at home and still is today.
Supper was always just supper. I was a grown woman before I realized some folks called the evening meal dinner instead of supper.
Regional differences in language fascinate me.
Here’s the entry for dinner from the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English.
dinner noun The midday meal, traditionally the main one of the day.
1924 Spring Lydia Whaley 1 Pap let the county build a school house free on his land which was nigh enuf for ’em to go home to dinner. And he was “powerful to send us to school.” 1940 Oakley Roamin’/Restin‘ 128 Its dinner in the mountains at 12 noon and supper at night. 1959 Pearsall Little Smoky 91 “Let’s get us some dinner” may be said any time from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. 1972 Cooper NC Mt Folklore 159 I want to go back where they eat three meals a day-breakfast, dinner and supper, where the word lunch will never be heard again. 1996 Houk Foods & Recipes 7 Before noon, women headed home to fix “dinner,” the main meal of the day, consisting of hot cornbread, beans, pork in some form, and possibly a dessert. Duly fortified, they went back out to the cornfield for the afternoon. What appeared on the table for supper often closely resembled what was left over from dinner.
Change is inevitable in all areas of life including language.
I noticed two examples of change in the dictionary entry. Today most folks aren’t working in the cornfields all day and for many folks the largest meal of the day is supper instead of dinner.
Even though I can’t stop the changes, I aim to continue the tradition of using dinner for the mid-day meal and supper for the evening meal.
You can find mine and Jim’s cookbook here.
Last night’s video: A Pitiful Winter Squash Crop & Matt Threw His Glasses in a Dumpster (when he was young).
Tipper
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Here in southern WV I grew up knowing dinner as the mid day meal and supper for the last meal of the day! Btw, your supper looked healthy and delicious! I had pinto beans, cucumbers, onions and tomatoes in oil, vinegar and sugar and fried corn meal fritters. It was delicious! Ain’t nothing like home style supper made by loving hands that make a home fire burn!!! God bless you all this day!!!
I am 70 years old and for all of life I have ate breakfast, dinner and supper although at work dinner would be called lunch. I have worked all three shifts and some of us would just say let’s go eat on the back shifts. I am country to the bone- nearest town of any size is 14 miles away, another thing that gets to me is the “newbies” moving in and calling the roads streets. I want to tell them the cities has streets, the country has roads.
Sanford, after retiring I will sometimes not eat when I first get up and wait until mid morning to eat a little bit of something. I laugh and say I have moved up a step in society and now eat brunch.
Dinner should be the main meal in the middle of the day, supper a lighter meal in the evening. The medical field tells us that like they’re the ones who made it up. Our people who came before us knew that they needed the fuel during the day when most active, not a couple of hours before bedtime. I never heard the word brunch till I was grown, never understood it. Isn’t the first meal of the day still breakfast no matter what time you eat it? If you eat brunch do you skip dinner or supper?
Yep it was Breakfast, Dinner and then Supper when I grew up in Southern Indiana and Middle Ohio. I never heard of Lunch until I went off to college.
Always dinner and supper at both of my grandma’s house and mine.
We did hoe corn and go to the house for dinner.
Growing up dinner and supper were both used for the last meal of the day. My grandparents always said supper and my mom used both terms interchangeably, but my husband and I actually made an intentional decision to say supper so to keep our ancestors language going. That would probably sound weird to alot of people but I suspect my kindred spirits here won’t find it weird! We still say lunch for the midday meal though.
Hello Tipper. I enjoyed your and Matt’s video last night. It was a little sad to hear of Matt’s hatred of school. I leaned toward your version of just getting through it. To me it was a prison that all kids had to live through; and though I never liked it, I did well.
The first time I heard your mention of “dinner ” and “supper “, I knew exactly what you meant. As a kid I grew up in Northern Wisconsin. My grandparents were from Minnesota, so there was no southern influence that I can recall. It wasn’t until I moved to a big city that I was made fun of for calling their lunch, dinner. They thought my meal terms were dumb. Ouch! So you see, Tipper, Appalachia isn’t so isolated after all.
Blessings to you and the family!
A lot of people around here still say dinner and supper. I do. For me, dinner is the midday meal and the Lord fed a supper the night before His crucifixion. However, some of the younger ones around, including my son-in-law, in an effort to sound proper , will sometimes in company refer to the evening meal as dinner. I sometimes listen to the local sheriff’s office on the scanner. Our SO is very small with only a handful of deputies, almost all below 35. It always makes me smile when going off duty to eat their evening meal they radio the dispatcher and state, “67, I’ll be 10-6 for supper” like clockwork. 67 is dispatch and 10-6 means “I’ll be busy, unless urgent”. I told my wife once that I bet our county is one of the few where this happens. LOL! I was a teenager in the late 70’s and early 80’s. In the summer times, I was busy doing field work with people that were in their 70’s (born in the early 1900’s). I heard some interesting terminology. One term I heard my grandpa say during those times that has stuck with me was the word fagged that means severely exhausted or tired (i.e. I’m all fagged out).
The part about the officers going 10-6 for supper made me smile. A wholesome piece of simple goodness in a dark world. Thanks for sharing!
We used to call a cigarette a faggot or a fag.
AND, then along comes brunch which we called a mid-morning snack.