Brunch

May 26, 2014
Though the meal first appeared in America at Begue’s, a restaurant in New Orleans, in the late 1890s, according to Ternikar (a professor of sociology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse) the meal is truly a global event served in Germany, Turkey, India, and China, and often has an “anything goes” approach to menus for an event that’s more about kinship and conversation than a rigid meal. Ternikar does include a handful of recipes, but they’re an accompaniment rather than the main dish here. She prefers to focus on the social aspect of the meal as opposed to defining the classic brunch. It’s an admirable approach, but brunch’s mercurial nature ends up getting the best of her as she digresses into the rise of bridal brunches, museum brunches, and the role of brunches in television shows like The Big Bang Theory and Real Housewives of New York City. The result is a book best consumed à la carte rather than one big gulp; she’s unable to tie all the disparate elements together.

July 1, 2014
As Ternikar points out, what distinguishes breakfast from brunch is that breakfast inaugurates a workday, but brunch celebrates the weekend. Chinese enjoyed morning dim sum for centuries, but brunch appears to have arisen in England at the end of the nineteenth century as an outgrowth of hearty late breakfasts offered to hunters returning from an early morning shoot. The novel meal spread quickly to America and became a New Orleans tradition. New York caught on to the practice, and it was at the Waldorf Hotel (or Delmonico's) where eggs Benedict, now the iconic brunch dish, first appeared. Post-Prohibition Americans typically eschewed daytime drinking until they developed a thirst for now-classic brunch cocktails on the order of the mimosa and the Bloody Mary. Home brunches caught on in the 1930s as a way for tyro cooks to entertain without the fuss of preparing guests a full dinner. Friday brunch has lately invaded upscale Muslim communities.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)