British dopers, tell me about your meals

Hell, no, we go the cafe around the corner to get it.

I disagree with your characterization. The beans used in an English Fry Up are indeed Pork n Beans straight out of a can, usually Heinz but also similar to Campbell’s Pork & Beans. In America, “Baked Beans” are usually doctored up Pork n Beans or true Boston Baked Beans. “Baked Beans” usually infer a brown sugar and molasses addition, whilst the distinction of Pork n beans is that they are tomato based with little pieces of salt pork/pork fat and are usually the base for baked beans. Pork n Beans doesn’t mean that there are hot dogs in them…

Or to a Transport Cafe which BTW are no longer the “greasy spoons” of yesteryear.

Not a bit of it, these days a good fry up in a transport cafe is a thing of beauty

It’s not posh anymore, I think: just the standard word for the midday meal.

No, you’re not wrong, we just don’t ever call it blood pudding.

It’s best done while in a pre-hangover still-unfit-to-drive fug.

The British version don’t have pork fat in them - it’s not unusual for beans on toast/jacket potato to be the only vegan option on a menu.

Getting back to the OP, I think the terms for the various meals can not just regional and class based but depend on where the meal is eaten. My ex (public school educated) had dinner and tea at school, but lunch and dinner at home. As for myself, my evening meal at home is usually tea (eaten around 6pm), but I never go out for my tea. An evening meal out would be eaten later, and might be dinner although I don’t think I or my friends would use the term unless it was an “occaision”.

Clear as mud, huh?

I applaud you, Sir Doris, for bringing ‘public school’ into a thread intended to clarify aspects of British vocabulary :slight_smile:

Heh, I assumed we’d got that one sorted, but given the reference to blood pudding above, perhaps not.

I await a query about kidney pudding.

In my experience (YMMV):

Breakfast: Needs no definition, but the notion that the Full English Breakfast (or other equivalent fry-fest) is the everyday default is probably incorrect. Cereals, toast or other baked products are probably the common breakfast for those who take it.

**Elevenses: **Some kind of snack - often a cake or a stack of biscuits (that’s cookies) - taken around eleven in the morning, with coffee or tea.

**Lunch: ** The main midday meal, called dinner by some, especially if it is the biggest meal of the day, or the only cooked one.

**Tea: **Either an afternoon (4pm) version of Elevenses, but with more cake and no coffee, or the name of the evening meal.
(when the evening meal is called ‘tea’, it often (but probably not always) consists of cold foods such as sandwiches, or a sort of buffet selection of sausage rolls, sandwiches, cakes, etc, rather than a meat-and-two-veg type of cooked meal).

**Dinner: **Where this is not a synonm for Lunch, it means an evening meal, usually a cooked/plated meal and usually the most substantial of the day. Or it may mean a ‘meal out’ at a restaurant in the evening.

**Supper: **Either another term for the main evening meal, or a snack meal taken late in the evening.

Just to really mess things up, this thread has made me hungry and I’m now preparing a Full English for lunch.

That’s a mixed grill then, isn’t it?

For a mixed grill, I’d expect lamb chops and perhaps a steak.

No kidneys?
I’ve had cooked breakfasts that included a thin steak, I think.

Me too, though perhaps gammon rather than beef steak.

And kidneys (not too much).

Now you are entering the North / South divide.

Here in the sophisitcated South we might nibble on a croissant or a bagel (or have a fry-up).

It’s only up in t’rugged North that they eat Black Pudding.

I avoided baked beans entirely once I reached adulthood here in Australia because they were so sugary. When I lived in England for a few years I found that your baked beans didn’t have nearly so much sugar and were pretty good. Luckily when we got back we discovered that you can (if you look hard enough) find cans of what are called “English Recipe” baked beans here with very much reduced sugar. We never get anything else now.

So if you find your baked beans sugary, well, they could be worse.

It puts hair on’th chest.

Where I’m from calling your dinner your lunch pegs you as being a bit pretentious. You probably wear double breasted suits, drive a semi-expensive retirees car like a Rover and have a house full of carriage clocks. Think of a cross between Alan Partridge and Hyacinth Bucket :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh, and nobody ever says “elevenses”. Ever.

We move in different circles, Dominic, different circles.

Definitely. The first time I heard that word was whilst watching the Lord of the Rings. I recognised it immediately as some degenerate southern concept.

I didn’t realise potato bread was a food peculiar to Northern Ireland, I suppose we’re not such a cultural empire that we can push things on the rest of the country. My sister and her b/f boogled a waitress in a Liverpool cafe who was stunned to hear of “bread made from potatoes” :slight_smile:

Breakfast - Morning meal.
Lunch - Light midday meal.
Tea - Heavier meal than lunch, taken in the evening.
Dinner - Main meal of the day, taken at midday to replace lunch or evening to replace tea.
Supper - Light meal, taken late in the evening.