Amy Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook (1999)

Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook is mainly a collection of high calory, sugary and fatty foods. She starts with Burnet’s essential food path and never wanders far off. “You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner,”...

Modern Drama: Selected Plays from 1879 to the Present

Modern Drama: Selected Plays from 1879 to the Present is published by Longman Publishing Group   This is a comprehensive and balanced anthology offering a collection of 25 works of modern and contemporary drama from the 1870s through the early 1990s.  It features a...

James [Jacques] Tissot’s Picnic on the Grass (1881/82)

Elizabeth Newton and her children enjoy a birthday party in Tissot’s garden in St. John Wood, London. The partygoers sit on cushions beside a picnic cloth laden with food and drinks prominently placed in the immediate foreground. The children are of secondary...

Russell Lee’s The Blessing at Dinner on the Grounds at the All-Day Community Sing, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940)

Featured Image: Russell Lee. The Blessing at Dinner on the Grounds at the All-Day Community Sing, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940). Courtesy Library of Congress. LC-USF33- 012785-M5 [P&P] Also, Dinner on the Grounds, Nell Choate Jones. Church Supper (1945) Greenville...

Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874)

Trollope’s Phineas Redux is the fourth book in the Phineas Finn Series. It was among his most popular novels. Numerous hunt scenes and references suggest Finn’s plight evading his enemies. A halt during a fox hunt provides the opportunity for a simple picnic lunch in...

Fred Barnard’s Mr. Pickwick’s Picnic in The Pickwick Papers (1870c)

Pickwick’s picnic on a hunt in Dingley Dell is part of an abortive hunting expedition. It’s famous for Pickwick getting drunk and Sam Weller’s discussion of veal pies, pronounced “weal” in Weller’s Cockney accent. This picnic is...

Harry Hoffman’s Harvest Moon Walk (1912c.)

Hoffman’s Harvest Moon Walk is a masquerade picnic where revelers dress as vegetables. According to the Griswold Museum, “Hoffman’s eccentric depiction of strangely clad figures captures one of the Lyme Art Colony’s most festive rituals. On an...

Publications

The Picnic: A History is published by AltaMira Press, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield (2013) Picnics are happy occasions and have always been a diversion from everyday cares. We think of the picnic as an outdoor meal, set on a blanket, usually in the middle of...