Ploughman's Lunch
 

This question is for frequent visitors to London. Who makes the best Ploughman's Lunch? It's my favorite pub meal...

The ploughman's wife ? :) :)

Sorry I couldn't resist.

In these more egalitarian times, I would expect the ploughman to make his own lunch.

I wouldn't expect to meet many ploughmen in London.

No more ploughmen...everything's imported now! Good Chinese food in London though.

The ploughman's lunch was invented by the Milk Marketting Board in the 50s.

CHOLMONDLEYTRUFACT!

Nonetheless, I really enjoy sampling different cheeses, and I've found that some pubs offer a greater selection than others...it beats most of the other pub offerings!

"The ploughman's lunch was invented by the Milk Marketting Board in the 50s."

CW gullible belief in trite left-wing self-loathing mythology.

The source of this silly myth is a pinko anti-Thatcher whinge film of the early 1980s (called The Ploughman's Lunch), now mercifully not shown even in the grungiest recesses of Islington arthouses.

Its claim is that all our institutions - including the ploughman's lunch - were invented by repressive manipulative capitalists to exploit the easily-deluded proletariat.

Something only silly pinkos - who never read - could possibly believe, since English literature has had people eating bread, cheese and pickle together as a meal in boozers for at least 700 years. What the Milk Marketing Board (actually, the English Country Cheese Council, and yes the difference did matter to its management) did between 1958 and 1960 was invent a poncey name for a longstanding English tradition.

Doubtless to the makers of tax-subsidised neo-Trot propaganda about the repressive State, there's no difference between an institution and the name we call it by (what did Marx say about agit-prop?). But you'd have thought an alumnus of the school first called Collegium Sanctae Mariae would understand the difference.

CW.....Ouch!!!!!

This St Marys boy got my excellent information from no less a source than Victoria Coren - daughter of one of the greatest Englishmen (and sister of one of the worst).

It was on Balderdash and Piffle. And if it's good enough for the OED it's good enough for me (and I have a bit of a thing for Ms Coren - posh birds who play poker. Does it get better than that?)

>>>>>> Ploughman's Lunch The OED had no evidence for this before 1970. With help from Wordhunters, this has now been pushed back to 1960, when documents uncovered at the National Archive from the Milk Marketing Board reveal that the Ploughman's Lunch was invented as a marketing ploy to sell British cheese in pubs.>>>>

From here (interesting):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pre...0/piffle.shtml

BTW I had some shifty gastropub try and foist a ploughman's with pate on me. For shame.

Ps Have we still got a quango dedicated to flogging cheese?

Thank you, CW, for that link. It is really interesting. I can recall my (then) English FIL using "Codswallop" in the late fifties. Still have no idea what it means, except "Rubbish".

:-)

CW, please explain : "This St. Marys boy..."

It just means rubbish.

Do ploughmen go into pubs and ask for a stockbroker's lunch?
When I were a lad, you had a choice of crisps or pickled eggs.

"It just means rubbish" was related to codswallop.

(I think it was more likely that the root of that would be "cods" as an old usuage for bollocks (as in codpiece).

>>>>CW, please explain : "This St. Marys boy...">>>

Flanneur was showing off and referred to my old school by the name it went by in the 1380s.

I was showing off by acknowledging it.

All this mention of cheese, and no-one has yet quoted Monty Python, or Wallace & Gromit. A sad commentary on the decline of the British nation and its raconteurs.

I am unconvinced by the BBC website with first dates for various phrases. I was definitely asked by a hairdresser if I was "alright for the weekend, sir" in the early sixties. I was still at school, and had no idea what he was talking about. Was it one of those mysterious "styptic pencils" that hung on a card by the mirror? And whatever happened to them?

Anyone who trusts a sister of Britain's most obnoxious pillock (do you think he doubles as that dickhead poster on this site who doesn't know how to do capital letters?) has a serious easily-gulled problem.

Flannertruefacts:

1. Bread cheese and pickle has been served in boozers since at least the 14th century. Usually with the snappy title "bread and cheese"
2. The OED first finds the phrase "ploughman's lunch" used in 1837.
3. No-one disputes that the ECCC re-invented the phrase between 1958 and 1960, and that it had hardly ever been used before.
4. But it IS recorded in 1956, before the ECCC got into branding (http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2007...y-or-innocent/)
5. The crucial point is: Coren (V) isn't writing about the invention of the meal - but about the invention of the name. The ranting commies who made Ploughman's Lunch flat out say the meal's a modern invention.

And claiming that is as absurd as claiming that a breakfast fryup's a product of the 1980s, on the (true but trivial ) grounds that we can't find the term 'Full Monty' used to describe one till then.

What happened to bay rum?
I haven't seen it for years

CW : Thanks. My old British school was - and still is for all I know - also a St. Marys, so it made me wonder if... unbelieveably....

>>I was definitely asked by a hairdresser if I was "alright for the weekend, sir" in the early sixties<<

That wasn't the only conventional phrase in an old-fashioned barber's shop. It was quite usual to be asked "Something on top, sir?" (meaning Brylcreem, for those of the Denis Compton generation).

A friend of mine told me he wasn't really listening when he went for a haircut in one such place (in the 60s, and yes, we did get our hair cut then - sometimes), and assumed he'd heard the latter rather than the former. He only realised this when he saw the barber's reaction to his reply - "No thanks, I'm washing it tonight anyway".