Seymour’s picnics sketches show a keen awareness of their potential for humor and satire. Especially if they’ve gone wrong. Unpacking for a Pic-Nic, for example, pokes fun at what breaks in a basket, as the legend makes amply clear, “Oh! Dear,...
“A Jaunt to the Looking-Glass Prairie and Back” left Dickens with mixed feelings. The weather was hot and the journey tedious, but the picnic on Looking-Glass Prairie” was something Dickens wanted, mostly because he had been told that any sightseer...
Beeton’s picnic entry appears almost as an afterthought in the last chapter of Household Management. As with other formal dinner suggestions, the picnic is not a casual affair but a staged “dinner held in the “rough.” Where Beeton situates...
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Partie de Campagne, an 1897 lithograph, depicts a couple going off to spend a day in the country. Lautrec makes a visual pun by having a dog run behind the conveyance known as a dogcart. According to French usage of the day, Lautrec prefers...
When the war began in 1914, picnic baskets were shelved. But when the peace was negotiated at Versailles in June 1919, wickers were dusted off and repacked. Signaling the change, The Illustrated London News editors suggested that it was time for picnicking—in the...
Leyel’s Picnic for Motorists is designed for an emerging market linking the joy of picnics with the pleasure of motoring. “There are many people with cars who make a regular habit of spending Saturday or Sunday in the country,” Leyel trills, “with a hamper of food,...
Tucked into Beard’s many cookbooks are informative and playful suggestions for picnicking. He writes, “Wherever it is done, picnicking can be one of the supreme pleasures of outdoor life. At its most elegant, it calls for the accompaniment of the best...
Franey, executive chef of Le Pavilion, New York’s only four-star restaurant, and Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, planned an August picnic on Gardiners Island. * It was staged in August 1965 and ironically reported in a Life magazine issue...
Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden’s sisters have written a family food memoir. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine is a short biography of their father, Bud Darden, Walter T. Darden, MD, with a picnic menu attached. The sisters’ family picnic memories at...
Suggested contemporary picnic fare for jane Austen includes many dishes requiring extensive preparation. We know who does the eating, but who does the prepping and the cooking? Broccoli (served hot or cold) Salmagundi Oysters, Stewed and in Loaves A Pretty Dish of...
