A fricassee is picnic food when dining indoors. It’s mentioned in Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) and Mary Belson Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic Nic (1809). Had Elliott needed a recipe, she might have found it in Mrs. Rundell’s A New System...
McCulloch-Williams’s memories of her Mammy’s cooking are the basis of Dishes and Beverages of the Old South. The pig barbecue is probably the same vintage of the Wilkes’s Twelve Oaks picnic garden as Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Her cookery...
Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Etc. (1881) Is the second oldest African-American cookbook. When she does relate food to a particular meal, it’s Breakfast cream cake or Waffles for breakfast. She does not mention a...
David’s “Indian Picnics: Picnic at Kutub Minar” is an anecdote related in Summer Cooking (1955). This moonlight picnic is held at Kutub Minar, a leaning tower (238 feet) now in ruins just outside Delhi. David says that if the picnic was wrong from the start, it was...
Harland’s Brunswick Stew in Common Sense in the Household (1871) Brunswick Stew is a thick tomato-based stew usually made with lima or butter beans, okra, corn, and meats such as beef, pork, chicken, or squirrel. In Harland believes the stew is named after New...
Atkinson’s satirizes a Sunday School outing by making it a continuous set of missteps that leave the three Lennox children, Clifford, Babs, and Bunty, in such a rush to the train station that only two of them make it. The problem is that Nell Lennox, their...
During the first summer of FDR’s presidency, the Roosevelts hosted a Fourth of July picnic at their vacation home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick [about a half mile off the coast of Lubec, Maine]. Formality ruled, and men and women dressed in a causal style,...
Hallowell and Levy’s Green Perspectives is an anthology of readings aimed at engaging students with current ecological issues and the history of the environmental movement. It is chronologically organized from 1850 through 1993 and focuses on the American...
The second oldest African American cookbook is Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Etc. She does not mention picnics in her text, but fried chicken is a picnic staple. Fried Chicken: Cut the chicken up, separating every...
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 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)](https://picnicwit.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/James-Jacques-Tissot-Le-dejeuner-sur-lherbe-1881-82.jpg)
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...
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...
Ishigo accompanied her Japanese husband Arthur when he was interred in 1942 until World War II ended. Japanese Picnic in Elysian Park exemplifies Ishigo’s renewed spirits a decade after the hardship of unjust confinement. Elysian Park is among Los...
Bergman’s picnics in The Seventh Seal [Det Sjunde Inseglet], are moments of relief in an otherwise deadly serious drama about death and the meaning of God. When Block interrupts his game of chess with Death, he joins Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson)...
Sunbathing on the beach with champagne. Lartigue’s shadow is seen in the lower left corner. See Jacques Henri Lartigue. Chou Valton at the plage de la Garoupe, Cap d’Antibes, July 1932. Silver Gelatin Print.
In August 1939, Russia and Germany signed a non-aggression pact. The following October, Major Davidson-Houston was spying for the British Army, and “Siberian Picnic” is his public account of his 5,772-mile Trans-Siberian “Hard Class” train ride...
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...
Wunderlich’s Das Frühstuck im Grünen [Luncheon on the Grass] is a surrealistic adaptation of both Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Sensuality, sex, and any semblance of pleasantries are absent. Distorted, seemingly unhappy, figures sit in a barren landscape....
Galsworthy’s is a moral tale about the “deeply buried” guilt. What is supposed to be a romantic picnic celebrating a silver anniversary turns achingly poignant. Ashurst’s past is vividly recalled when inadvertently picnicking with his wife, Stella,...
