Picnic food for adults is important but not required. Most art and film scant food, often using it as decoration. Children’s picnics require comfort food. The more carbohydrates and fats, the better the picnic. I’ll treat children’s picnics in...
If you think hot dogs, fried chicken, or ham sandwiches are prime picnic foods, think again. A (brief) survey of picnic menus reveals preferences are limited only by one’s imagination, expense, preparation, and appetite. There is an ongoing conversation, some...
Unlike real-life children who are often persnickety about what is offered, fictional children at picnics take what is offered. That’s because most juvenile stories associate fun with baskets full of sweets, carbs, and fats. Presumably, well-behaved children require...
Picnic cookbooks are relatively new. The first in 1915 was Linda Larned’s One Hundred Picnic Suggestions. Like the song from Gypsy, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.,” new cookbooks, each striving for novelty, appear every year. Some are prettier than...
The Pic Nic Society attracted obsessive gamblers, eager amateur actors called Dilettanti, and gourmand diners. Taking advantage of a truce in a decade-long war with France (led by Napoleon, then First Consul), the Pic Nics wagered (and lost) that London might have a...
Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic appeared in 1809, six years after Harris’s The Happy Courtship, Nic. It is now remembered, if at all, as the second published reference to a picnic in English. However, following the French custom of indoor dining, the...
Dinner on the grounds (always with an “s”) is a Methodist revival meeting picnic. There are many geographic variations throughout the United States, but Southerners seem to hold sway, scheduling the meeting for “lay-by time,” sometime between...
Corny picnic satire was in vogue among English music before Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1871 Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. Typical “The Pic-Nic” is sung to the air of “Here’s the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen” from Sheridan’s The...
Homer’s A Picnic in the Woods is a pleasant joke, suggesting that the usually staid picnic might also be tumultuous. The action here is everywhere. A large picnic blanket is spread and filled with food: a bowl of fruit, a large ham with a knife for carving, a...
Donald Duck’s beach picnic makes a joke of expectations. Intending a pleasant day at the beach, Donald is upset and bedeviled with turmoil. Especially the ants, dressed in war paint like “Native Americans,” steal Donald’s picnic. The idea is...
