kitchen supper
English
Etymology
kitchen + supper. Original use from kitchen as a synecdoche for a household's servants. Later from the idea that the hosts forgo the dining room for the more private and relaxed kitchen.
Pronunciation
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Audio (AU): (file)
Noun
kitchen supper (plural kitchen suppers)
- (dated) The evening meal for servants, separate from the family's meal.
- The cook prided herself on making the kitchen supper as delicious as the family's dinner.
- An informal or semiformal meal served for guests, not necessarily one served in the kitchen.
- The couple threw an impromptu kitchen supper when the dinner reservations fell through.
Quotations
For quotations using this term, see Citations:kitchen supper.
Usage notes
In contemporary British use, the phrase is seen as snobbish and very U. Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph describes it as "disclosing an assumption – we have a nice dining room but we’ll be all relaxed with our pals and won’t use it – which is perplexingly, excludingly foreign to [a general] audience",[1] while Harry Mount says that "[although] the ingredients of a kitchen supper are universally recognisable [...] the actual expression is confined to the upper-middle classes".[2]