Honestly, brunch on Thursday sounds fine to me. — Dan
Brunch: Because We Like to Party
Today is Thursday, and as a result, it’s unlikely you’re eating brunch today. “Brunch” — a portmanteau of “breakfast” and “lunch” — is typically a ritual saved for Sunday, either in the late morning or early afternoon. Today, a typical American brunch features some mix of longer prep-time breakfast options like an egg dish or pancakes, some lunch-like options like salads or even hot sandwiches/burgers, and a signature cocktail like a mimosa (orange juice and a sparkling wine) as seen above. Brunch is both decadent and leisurely — and it’s rarely something you eat on a Thursday.
That’s because you don’t often have hangovers on Thursdays — and hangovers are why brunch was concocted in the first place.
We don’t often party on Wednesday nights. Saturday night, on the other hand, is time to stay up late and have some fun — just ask Elton John, the Bay City Rollers, or if you’re into disco, John Travolta. But that comes at a cost, as many of us have experienced. A late Saturday night can make for a difficult Sunday morning — we’re tired and, in some cases, hung over. And that’s not fun.
In 1895, a British writer named Guy Berringer came up with a solution for this type of ailment: shifting our eating habits to allow for more sleep, foods that soak up what we drank the night before, and maybe even a bit of booze to help transition our bodies as they rapidly detox from the prior evening’s binging. Berringer penned an piece for Harper’s Weekly titled “Brunch: A Plea,” coining the term for this new meal (“the word Brunch is a corruption of breakfast and lunch”) and arguing that it should become a mainstay of Sunday mornings thereafter. Mental Floss summarizes the key part of Beringer’s essay:
Instead of rousing folks from bed and confronting them with a heavy spread of meat pies, Beinger proposed a midmorning compromise: a hybrid meal that could lead with tea pastries and segue into meatier dishes. That way, brunchers wouldn’t be forced to stuff rich fare down their gullets. Instead, they could slowly shake off their headaches and calm their gurgling stomachs. If someone needed to chase the meal with a hair-of-the-dog cocktail, nobody would judge.
Further, Beringer argued, a shared meal such as this would extend the joy of the night before, as your brunch bunch could get together and swap stories from your varied nights on the town: “Brunch is a hospitable meal; breakfast is not. Eggs and bacon are adapted to solitude; they are consoling, but not exhilarating. They do not stimulate conversation. Brunch, on the contrary, is cheerful, sociable, and inciting. It is talk-compelling.” Why should Sundays be for nursing a hangover when some extra sleep and the right food options could make the party last another day — and improve the rest of the week?
All told, brunch wasn’t just about food — it was a cultural invention designed to treat the body gently after a long night, offering recovery, good food, and connection all in one meal. It’s no surprise that it remains popular today — even if you aren’t partying on Saturday night.
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More About Breakfast
Today’s Bonus fact: If you’re looking for an inexpensive breakfast, Ikea — yes, the furniture store — is a good place to look. Many have restaurants that have robust breakfast offerings for only a few bucks. And in 2014, that caused a problem for one store in the Netherlands. That Ikea offered a €1 breakfast which, despite the argument brunch articulated above, attracted a lot of guests on Sunday mornings — so many guests, in fact, that it caused a safety hazard. As the NL Times reported in January of that year, “Ikea Delft has decided to cancel their 1 euro breakfast, to aid in the battle against dangerous traffic back-ups on Sundays, due to an overwhelming amount of shoppers.” (Ikea didn’t have much of a choice in the matter; the local authorities threatened to shut down the road to the store if traffic continued to overwhelm the roadway.)
From the Archives: Why We Pour Milk on our Cereal: Another early meal tradition and the answer to the question, “why not just use water?”
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And thanks! — Dan