|
|
 |
DinnerThese articles are all part of the Meals series Common meals... Breakfast Second breakfast Elevenses Brunch Tiffin Lunch Tea Dinner Supper Dessert Snack See also... Cuisine | Kitchens Wikibooks: Cookbook Dinner is a food-related term with several meanings. According to definition, the term dinner is simply the largest meal of the day. As such, it could mean breakfast, lunch or supper, according the the prevailing traditions in any given family or region. It could even be a snack, if that happened to be your largest meal that day. As such, the term dinner could even be used for different meals in the same family, from day to day. Because of this, the term dinner is often ambiguous, as compared to other terms that already exist for the three main meals of the day: breakfast, lunch and supper. (Many who use the term dinner regularly would feel there are distinctions between that term and synonyms, but the general idea will be conveyed by the unambiguous terms.) In most parts of the United States and Canada, dinner is the evening meal served around 6 p.m. In some regions, such as the Maritimes and Québec, the evening meal is called supper (souper in Québec), and dinner (dîner) refers to the noon meal, which itself would be called lunch in most parts of the United States and Canada. In the United Kingdom, dinner traditionally meant the main meal of the day. Because of differences in custom as to when this meal was taken, dinner might mean the evening meal (typically in the higher social classes) or the midday meal (typically in lower social classes, who may describe their evening meal as tea). There is sometimes snobbery and reverse snobbery about which meaning is used. Large formal evening meals are invariably described as dinners (hence, also, the term dinner jacket which is a form of evening dress). School dinners is a British phrase for school lunches. Ambiguity is often avoided altogether by using lunch for the midday meal and tea or supper for the evening meal, though these terms can also carry their own ambiguities. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "dinner" referred to breakfast in Middle English. A more formal definition of "dinner", especially outside North America, is any meal consisting of multiple courses. The minimum is usually two but there can be as many as seven. Possible courses are: Hors d'oeuvres (also known as appetizers, starters) Soup course (occasionally sorbet) Fish course Salad course Main course (also known as meat course) Dessert course (also known as the Sweet or pudding course) Cheese course Some confusion is caused by the word entrée, which is used in North America for the main course, but which was originally one of the earlier courses (most likely the fish course, when the main dish was red meat). In French, les entrées are the appetisers, and entrée is a somewhat pretentious word in Great Britain for the same thing ("starters" is more commonly seen). Check out the following recipes that are tagged "Dinner":
|