picnic
A picnic is a meal eaten outdoors. A picnic is often combined with a break during an excursion . Utensils often used in this context are the picnic basket, the picnic blanket or the picnic dishes, although these terms do not necessarily have to have a special nature.
Cultural history
The common planned eating outdoors was already known in antiquity . The Greeks had the term Eranos for it , the Romans called it Prandium . During the "wonderful multiplication of the bread" , Jesus Christ commanded the people to lie down on the grass, "and they all ate and were satisfied." In the Middle Ages, travelers were often forced to dine outside of inns, and in agriculture it was customary to eat what they had brought along while working in the fields for hours. A meal break was also taken during a stately hunt. In the baroque era , eating outdoors became popular among aristocratic circles, particularly in France.
For a long time, however, there was no separate term for these outdoor meals. In the literature, meals were sometimes referred to as “alfresco”, i.e. outdoors. Before 1800, at least three picnics were described in the literature without being called that. The oldest known description is contained in the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio . A little later, the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer appeared . In the 16th century, hunting manuals described eating meals outdoors. Oliver Cromwell had dinner served in Hyde Park in 1654 , and the author Samuel Pepys ate regularly on boat trips on the Thames .
The picnic became particularly popular in England during the Victorian Age , as Queen Victoria often dined outside. The classic picnic basket, which contains both the food and a blanket, crockery and cutlery, appeared in Britain in the 19th century. Tea preparation was always part of the picnic, so that before the invention of the thermos flask , a portable cooking device was often taken along.
The picnic is still popular with the upper classes in Great Britain to this day and can have the rank of a social event. This is the case, for example, at the horse races at Ascot or at the tennis tournament at Wimbledon . In the popular sport of cricket , the rules stipulate a 20-minute tea break during which an outdoor snack is taken.
etymology
According to most sources, the word picnic is of French origin and appeared in connection with noble fashion in the 17th century. Tony Willis first used the term pique-nique in his Origines de la Langue Française publication in 1692. It is composed of piquer for “pick” and nique for “little thing”. But the British also claim the origin of the term for themselves. Evidence is given of a letter from the English Lord Chesterfield to his son from 1748, in which the latter describes a meeting as a picnic , although it was not about eating. With this meaning, picnick appeared in a Swedish text as early as 1738.
In Japan, eating outdoors is an old tradition, especially around the cherry blossom season. In the 20th century, the term pikunikku was incorporated into the Japanese language as a loan word .
Old dictionaries describe a picnic, somewhat different from its current meaning, as a shared meal in the open air, to which each participant brings their own food (now also known as a potluck ).
The claim that the word picnic was derived from lynch parties has been around in Black American communities for many years. The word picnic did not begin with the lynching of black Americans, but rather the lynching of blacks often took place in "picnic-like" locations, with the crowds eating and drinking or gathering to eat afterwards.
Picnic in art
The most famous representation of a picnic in the visual arts is Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Édouard Manet . The naked woman (besides the attracted men) takes the nude picnics of nudism anticipated.
The painting "Picnic" by Ernst Oppler was created around the turn of the century and shows a sketch of a scene of upper-class life.
The film Picnic won two Academy Awards in 1955 (Best Editing, Best Film Set Design).
See also
- Pan-European picnic
- the picnic in Fancy Farm (Kentucky, USA) is an important political occasion
- Beer garden
- Potluck
swell
- ↑ a b c Information from the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture
- ↑ SWR contribution (2004)
- ↑ [1]
- ↑ Blacks, picnics and lynchings - JimCrow Museum (en-US) . In: www.ferris.edu , January 1, 2004.
literature
- Jeanne-Marie Darblay (Ed.): Picnic - Pleasure, Pleasure & Enjoyment . Müller Rüschlikon, Cham 1994, ISBN 3-275-01092-1 .
- Charlotte Trümpler, Matthias Wagner K (Ed.): Picnic Time (exhibition catalog Museum Angewandte Kunst , Frankfurt a. M.), Walther König , Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-96098-106-0 .
