In my father's childhood and certainly in his father's childhood, dinner was the main meal, eaten noonish. Children came home from school as did their fathers. At night, I suppose, folks must have had a little something -- a glass of iced tea and half a sandwich made with leftovers, and they called it "supper."
In my childhood, Thursday Night Suppers at St Luke's brought together families at church without the church part. Mothers laid out homemade dishes on a long table in the hall, more delectable for their very "foreignness" than any Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, which we, confusingly, ate in early afternoon. Every Sunday night, my family supped with the Chenoweths. Our weekly get-togethers sometimes brought waffles and chipped beef or New England boiled dinner in winter and Boston butt or Joe Mazzotti in summer. Sunday night supper ritualized our friendship.
When I search the Internet for hints about supper, I find this from Wikipedia: "Supper . . . is ordinarily the last meal of the day. Originally, in the middle ages, it referred to the lighter meal following dinner, which until the eighteenth century was invariably eaten as the midday meal." Then the entry becomes complicated: "In England, whereas 'dinner,' when used for the evening meal, is fairly formal, 'supper' is used to describe a less formal, simpler family meal, but also the fairly formal variety in others." In other words, the English have tea when others have supper.
Dinner wears cloth napkins and best manners; supper promises lightness of food and heart, gustatory pleasure enjoyed with gusto. Take tonight's private pile of plums and peach, fresh from an Alabama orchard, eaten ripe and raw from the bowl.
Fingers licked, I'd answer the great-niece now with, "Dinner? What's that? Give me supper any day!"
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