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".

P.S.

No-one's given poor mnapoli an answer. I wouldn't have thought it worth going out of one's way, no matter how much one likes cheese. And I doubt if those few of us who have a gourmet appreciation of cheese would expect to find anything special in a pub. Plenty of the OK or good enough, perhaps, with the standard sorts of cheese, but that's about it. But I suppose there may be enthusiasts somewhere with a special local cheese on the menu.

A gourmet ploughman's lunch. Now that's an idea...well maybe not.

This thread, of such humble origins, is one of the more enjoyable in recent memory.

St Mary's sounds like a school for girls, if you ask me.

I can just picture CW in needlework class with a nun peering at his Algerian Eye.

On Patrick's point:

I'd say the answer is actually Whole Foods Mart in the Barker's building in Kensington Higg St.

Though unbelievably awful in practically every possible way, it gets just two things right: its cheese (especially the hard cheeses - British, Swiss and Dutch - that are the centrepiece of a decent ploughman's), and its bread (the cakes in its bakery are those ghastly overcreamed and over-iced monstrosities Americans poison themselves with, but there's some excellent bread). They've also got an adequate selection of proper English bottled beer.

Even at its insane prices, a decent ploughman's for two could be put together for less than a pub would charge you for far worse kept cheese.

Its branded packaged area is so stuffed with those absurd brands with no differnce between each other that I lost the will to live, so I don't know whether they sell proper pickle.

But M&S run a professionally managed food store 50 yards west, with a reasonable range of pickles. Pick up a couple of jars and you can avoid pubfood altogether.

Better yet: go to any good central London farmers' market, do the same thing for a great deal less, and avoid having to read the nonsensical Stalinist propaganda ("We give our staff health benefits") that WFM kid themselves you're so stupid you'll be impressed to find hectoring you.

Righty Ho! Let's nail this puppy good and proper.

Yes people have been eating bread and cheese in pubs for centuries. However I'd put good money on the fact that they weren't eating bread. cheese, half an apple, Branston, celery, bread with bits in and the inevitable garnish of bloody cress and half a lettuce leaf. Served on a wooden plate. By a Pole.

The above is a Ploughman's Lunch (note caps) as devised by people in shiny-arsed suits and Brylcream in the 50s.

As to where to get a good one? God knows, they're all pretty much of a muchness aren't they?

St Mary's sounds like a school for girls, if you ask me.>>>>

Which is why it's no longer called that (well technically it is - but no one uses the name)

>>>I can just picture CW in needlework class with a nun peering at his Algerian Eye.>>>

Is that the same as a Jap's Eye? In which case you know some odd nuns.

It's a needlework stitch!

£5 in the filthy thoughts box, please.

Appropos made up food. When did putting chicken and chips in a basket seem like a good idea?

Quiz question of the week:

Which megastar was once described as an old boiler in a basque?

Madonna?

It's enough to put you off your ploughman's:

http://tinyurl.com/byura9

Or possibly put you off eating anything ever again (especially prawn cocktail flavoured crisps):

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...cle2175548.ece

"When did putting chicken and chips in a basket seem like a good idea?"

About the same time someone decided you could make a great gateau out of black forest. Or that prawns would make a terrific cocktail alternative to Bloody Marys or Screwdrivers

But Black Forest Gateau is bloody lovely. Prawn cocktail isn't bad either.

I'm also quite partial to sole veronique and duck a l'orange.

I'm a hopeless case.

Black Forest Gateau = yum.

Prawn Cocktail = yuk.

Duck a l'orange = yum.

Sole Veronique = poncy and silly (if it's the one with the grapes)

Yes it's the one with the grapes.

I was recently channel surfing and going through the channels you've never heard of and I came across an episode of The Galloping Gourmet.

How did we survive eating that stuff?

Flanner, I really can't believe that you put so much effort creating such a wonderful answer for such a simple subject.

Well done, but you must have far too much time on your hands.


;-)

Muck

You think the Milk Marketing Board was bad - look what the mighty Jello Lobby foisted upon an unsuspecting USA

http://www.lileks.com/institute/gall...llo/index.html

sorry for the hijack, napoli:

FlannerUK:

I'm still looking for an answer to my question I posted on Chol's "Donetz board"...as follows:

Author: tower
Date: 01/16/2009, 02:23 pm
Flanner:


Curious. What's your problem with Barlad (Birlad)? I've been traveling all of Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria for more than 30 years.

It serves as the key Eastern Romanian town in one of my historical novels, c. early 1900's.
Instead of our further hijacking Chol's dilemma, write me direct, if you will. Thank you for your kindness in doing so.

Stu Tower

[email protected]