Picnic

, c. 1950 The word comes from the French pique-nique. However, it may also have been borrowed from the German word Picknick, which was itself borrowed from French. The earliest English citation is in 1748, from Lord Chesterfield (Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield) who associates a "pic-nic" with card-playing, drinking, and conversation; around 1800, Cornelia Knight spelled the word as "pique-nique" in describing her travels in France. 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, 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 with the meaning of a shared meal, with each guest paying for himself, but with no reference to eating outdoors. It reached the ''Dictionnaire de l'Académie française'' in 1840 with the same meaning. In English "picnic" began to refer to an outdoor meal only at the beginning of the 19th century. ==History==

, 1723 The practice of an elegant meal eaten out-of-doors, rather than an agricultural worker's mid-day meal in a field, was connected with respite from hunting from the Middle Ages; the excuse for the pleasurable outing of 1723 in François Lemoyne's painting (illustration) is still offered in the context of a hunt. In it, a white cloth can be seen, and, on it, wine, bread, and roast chicken. In 1802, a fashionable group of over 200 aristocratic Londoners formed the Pic Nic Society. The members were Francophiles, or may have been French, who flaunted their love for all things French when the wars with France lulled between 1801 and 1830. Church picnics Various religious denominations host annual church picnics for their congregation and local community. These picnics traditionally take place from August to mid-October when church members and the community socialize over food, conversation and games. In 1937, the Congregational Church of New York hosted 2,000 for its 41st annual event. 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. ==Types of contemporary picnic food==

Contemporary picnics for many people involve simple food. In The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson offers hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches and pieces of cold chicken as good examples. In America, food writer Walter Levy suggests that 'a picnic menu might include cold fried chicken, devilled eggs, sandwiches, cakes and sweets, cold sodas, and hot coffee'. == Activities ==

at a company picnic in the United States, 1974 In the mid 19th century, picnic games were organised by charities in the US to raise funds. In the 1880s, companies started to sponsor such picnic events for publicity and to gain the favour of their employees. The black community was segregated at this time but to gain respectability, games such as baseball were organised by black politicians at picnics in municipal parks and fairgrounds. Games played at a picnic may use the food which has been brought. Heavy food such as a watermelon may be used in a relay race which also serves the purpose of transporting the food to the eating area. After it is consumed, the seed or stones of fruit like cherries may be used for a spitting contest game or marbles. If a large crowd is expected for a picnic, some organisation will be required. A schedule of events may be drawn up and events organised for different levels of ability and types of participant: men, women, adults and children. Handbills, notices and tickets may be used to publicise and administer the events. ==Cultural representations==

'', 15th century Film • The 1955 film Picnic, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same title by William Inge, was a multiple Oscar winner. A picnic is expected in the film but the writer does not include it: 'There is no picnic in Picnic'. Paintings From the 1830s, Romantic American landscape paintings of spectacular scenery often included a group of picnickers in the foreground. An early American illustration of the picnic is Thomas Cole's The Pic-Nic of 1846 (Brooklyn Museum of Art). In it a guitarist serenades the genteel social group in the Hudson River Valley with the Catskills visible in the distance. 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. • ''Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass'') by Édouard Manet depicts a picnic. The 1862 painting juxtaposes a female nude and a scantily dressed female bather on a picnic with two fully dressed men in a rural setting. • A more modern portrayal is Past Times by Kerry James Marshall, from 1997, which depicts a black family picnicking in front of a lake. Two radios laid on their gingham patterned picnic blanket emit the lyrics of The Temptations and Snoop Dogg, while figures in the background engage in other activities synonymous with affluent white-American suburban culture. '' by Édouard Manet, 1862 Literature {{Blockquote|A book of verse beneath the bough, A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – Ah, wilderness were paradise enow! • Jane Austen is one of the first English novelists to name picnics. She has two outdoor picnics in the novel Emma (1816). One is in the strawberry garden at Donwell Abbey. Parties where guests would pick their own strawberries were popular in the early nineteenth century and Mrs Elton, wearing a large bonnet and carrying a basket, spoke at length about them. The food is described in vague terms as a 'cold collation'. While Jane Austen talked excessively about food in her private letters, she was less obliging in her novels. • In Alfred Tennyson's poem Audley Court (1838) the picnickers eat dark bread and cold game pie in aspic and drink cider while they sing and chat about their old love affairs. • In Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) a 'potluck' meal is described "For dinner we'll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we'll have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we'll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we'll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare - in short we'll have whatever there is on hand.' But Dickens, Levy argues, 'differentiates potluck and picnic' when he adds that 'Miss Twinkleton (in her amateur state of existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a picnic'. • In Fernando Arrabal's one-act drama Picnic on the Battlefield (1959) the young and inexperienced soldier private Zepo is visited unexpectedly by his devoted parents. They arrive with a picnic basket, which they unpack 'spreading sausage, hard-boiled eggs, ham, sandwiches, salad, cakes, and red wine on a cloth'. Benuzzi's English title, perhaps suggested by this line of de Watteville's, refers to the expression 'It was no picnic', meaning 'It was hard going', but with an ironic allusion to the climbers' meagre P.O.W. rations. • The novel Roadside Picnic (1972) by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, was the source for the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky. The novel is about a mysterious 'zone' filled with strange and often deadly extraterrestrial artefacts, which are theorized by some scientists to be the refuse from an alien "picnic" on Earth. Music • In 1906, the American composer John Walter Bratton wrote a musical piece originally titled "The Teddy Bear Two Step". It became popular in a 1908 instrumental version renamed 'Teddy Bears' Picnic', performed by the Arthur Pryor Band. The song regained prominence in 1932 when the Irish lyricist Jimmy Kennedy added words and it was recorded by the then popular Henry Hall (and his BBC Dance Orchestra) featuring Val Rosing (Gilbert Russell) as lead vocalist, and went on to sell a million copies. 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic' resurfaced again in the late 1940s and early 1950s when it was used as the theme song for the Big Jon and Sparkie children's radio show. This perennial favorite has appeared on many children's recordings ever since, and is the theme song for the AHL's Hershey Bears hockey club. lyrics and audio from the BBC • 'Stoned Soul Picnic', by Laura Nyro (released in 1968), was also a major hit for the group The 5th Dimension. • Roxette's 1996 song 'June Afternoon' depicts images of people having fun and eating in a park during a warm sunny June day. ==References==