Picnic

A picnic is a meal taken outdoors (al fresco) as part of an excursion, especially in scenic surroundings, such as a park, lakeside, or other place affording an interesting view, or else in conjunction with a public event such as preceding an open-air theater performance,[1] and usually in summer or spring.

[7][8][9] It first appears in 1649 in an anonymous broadside of burlesque verse called Les Charmans effects des barricades: ou l'Amitié durable de la compagnie des Frères bachiques de pique-nique : en vers burlesque (The Lasting Friendship of the Band of Brothers of the Bacchic Picnic).

The satire describes Brother Pique-Nique who, during the civil war known as the Fronde,[2] attacks his food with gusto instead of his enemies; Bacchus was the Roman god of wine, a reference to the drunken antics of the gourmand musketeers.

By 1694 the word was listed in Gilles Ménage's Dictionnaire étymologique, ou Origines de la langue françoise[10] with the meaning of a shared meal, with each guest paying for himself, but with no reference to eating outdoors.

A famous example is the Pan-European Picnic held on both sides of the Hungarian/Austrian border on 19 August 1989 as part of the struggle towards German reunification; this mass meal led indirectly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On Bastille Day 2000, as a Millennium celebration, France created "l'incroyable pique-nique" (the incredible picnic), which stretched 1000 km from the English Channel to the Mediterranean, along the Méridienne verte.

These picnics traditionally take place from August to mid-October when church members and the community socialize over food, conversation and games.

[17] American psychologist and newspaper columnist Dr. George W. Crane once wrote that Christ held the first church picnic when he asked his disciples to feed the 5,000 who gathered to hear him speak.

In The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson offers hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches and pieces of cold chicken as good examples.

[2] Picnics are traditionally eaten at Glyndebourne Opera during the interval and Roden proposes a Champagne Menu, as made by the Argentinian pianist Alberto Portugheis: Mousse de Caviare, Chaudfroid de Canard, Tomatoes Farcies and Pêches aux fraises (caviare mousse, cold duck, stuffed tomatoes and peaches and strawberries).

Cole's well-dressed young picnickers having finished their repast, served from splint baskets on blue-and-white china, stroll about in the woodland and boat on the lake.

There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid A damask napkin wrought with horse and hound, Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home, And, half-cut-down, a pasty costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied; last, with these, A flask of cider from his father's vats, Prime, which I knew; and so we sat and ate And talked old matters over; who was dead, Who married, who was like to be, and how.