Gaston Balande’s <em>Lunch on the Banks of the Seine </em> and <em>Camping</em> (1930s) Balande’s painting Déjeuner au bord de la Seine or Picnic by a River epitomizes Parisians at play along the Seine just at the start of World War I. Camping...
“The Piety And Eggs Of Paterson” is Dreiser’s version of a picnic gone wrong. It’s strategically placed at the start of A Hoosier Holiday because Dreiser meant it as a metaphor for what is to come and how his motor trip from New York to Terre...
Woolf’s picnic on the summit of Monte Rosa, a fictional place in South America, is the high point (pun intended) of The Voyage Out (1915). Journeying on donkeys walking in a single file, the narrator creates the image of “a jointed caterpillar, tufted with...
Larned suggests any food is picnic food as long as it can be transported. The motorcar made this wish viable, if not practical, and One Hundred Picnic Suggestions is the first cookbook dedicated to picnicking. The cover shows a picnic basket, sandwiches, and thermos...
Wharton’s Summer is the story of a summer romance doomed to failure that begins with seduction at a picnic. When Charity Royall, a small-town girl of seventeen, falls for Lucius Harney, a socially upscale architect, she loses her innocence at a picnic. The...
Fanny Brandeis is a new woman, whose career comes first, and when Clarence Heyl, an unacknowledged suitor, asks her to picnic, she says that she’s so busy working that she has forgotten how. But the next morning, Fanny is sitting in a train heading out from...
Stettheimer liked whimsy and humor in her paintings but included jokes only her friends would recognize. Her outlook is surreal. She preferred the outdoors, like Picnic in Bedford Hills, because interiors are less joyful than an outdoor scene. Like Matisse’s The Red...
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...
When Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed by October ice in Antarctica, he and five companions set out for South Georgia Island, 800 miles away, in some of the most stormy and cold ocean on Earth. Their boat was a whaler, James Caird, barely big enough for the men...
This recipe is Ranhoffer’s response to Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Sam Weller’s description of “weal pies.” Dickens dined at Delmonico’s in New York City while Ranhofer was chef de cuisine, but this item was not on the menu. Veal...
