Ploughman's lunch

Ploughman's lunch

A ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, butter, sliced onion, wedges of cheese, and ale
Type	Meal
Place of origin	United Kingdom
Created by	Cheese Bureau
Main ingredients	Bread • cheese • pickle

A ploughman's lunch (abbrev. to ploughman's) is an English cold meal which consists of cheese, pickle, and bread. Additional items such as apple, boiled eggs, ham, and pickled onions may be added. As its name suggests, it is more commonly consumed at midday.

Beer, bread, and cheese have been combined in the English diet since antiquity. However, the specific term "ploughman's lunch" is believed to date no further back than the 1950s, when the Cheese Bureau (a marketing body affiliated to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency) began promoting the meal in pubs as a way to increase the sales of cheese, which had recently ceased to be rationed. Its popularity increased as the Milk Marketing Board promoted the meal nationally throughout the 1960s.

Pierce the Ploughman's Crede (c.1394) mentions the traditional ploughman's meal of bread, cheese and beer. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the first recorded use of the phrase "ploughman's lunch" as 1837, from the book Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott by John G. Lockhart, but this stray early use may have meant merely the sum of its parts, "a lunch for a ploughman". Bread and cheese formed the basis of the diet of rural labourers for centuries, with skimmed-milk cheese, supplemented with a little lard and butter, forming a source of fats and protein for farmworkers along with bread; onions and leeks were the "favoured condiment".

The OED's next reference is from the July 1956 Monthly Bulletin of the Brewers' Society, which describes activities of the Cheese Bureau. It describes how the Bureau:

This implies that a "traditional combination" of bread, beer, cheese, and pickle was popular before rationing in the United Kingdom (during and after World War II). In 1956, author Adrian Bell reported: "There's a pub quite close to where I live where ... all you need say is, 'Ploughboy's Lunch, Harry, please'. And in a matter of minutes a tray is handed across the counter to you on which is a good square hunk of bread, a lump of butter and a wedge of cheese, and pickled onions, along with your pint of beer". Only one year later, in June 1957, another edition of the Monthly Bulletin of the Brewers' Society, referred to a ploughman's lunch using exactly that name, and said that it consisted of "cottage bread, cheese, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, cold sausages and, of course, beer". The Glasgow newspaper The Bulletin from 15 April 1958 and The Times from 29 April 1958 refer to a ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, cheese and pickle.