Sugar Sandwiches

Sugar Sandwiches

According to Andrew Smith, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, explains that a “sugar sandwich” is a generic sandwich with sugar added, such as a banana sandwich with sugar sprinkled on the bananas, or homemade peanut butter,...
Theodore Boyer’s  Luncheon with the Devil (2012)

Theodore Boyer’s Luncheon with the Devil (2012)

The Devil is portrayed as a smiling horned goat enjoying a picnic with a man and two women dressed in contemporary clothing. The food is watermelon. There is a story for this picnic that is yet to unfold. Featured Image: Theodore Boyer. Luncheon with the Devil. Oil...
Pierre Girieud’s Homage to Gauguin (1906)

Pierre Girieud’s Homage to Gauguin (1906)

Homage to Gauguin is an allusion da Vinci’s Last Supper. Instead of Jesus, Gauguin is seated  (third from right) with his friends and admirers. A picnic feast ought to be jolly, but these picnickers are solemn and unhappy. The images and colors all related to...
Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)

Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)

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...
Eleanor Roosevelt on Campobello Island (1931)

Eleanor Roosevelt on Campobello Island (1931)

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,...
Green Perspectives

Green Perspectives

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...
Abby Fisher’s Fried Chicken (1881)

Abby Fisher’s Fried Chicken (1881)

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...
Amy Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook  (1999)

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

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)

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...
Estelle Peck Ishigo’s Japanese Picnic in Elysian Park (1954)

Estelle Peck Ishigo’s Japanese Picnic in Elysian Park (1954)

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...
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal  (1957)

Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)

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)...
J.V. Davidson-Houston’s “Siberian Picnic” (1939)

J.V. Davidson-Houston’s “Siberian Picnic” (1939)

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...
Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874)

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...
John Galsworthy’s “The Apple Tree” (1916)

John Galsworthy’s “The Apple Tree” (1916)

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,...