Cough Lunches In The Late 19th Century

1. Introduction

However, the first lunch boxes weren't for kids at all. In the late 1800s, blue-collar workers carried their lunches to work in metal pails, which protected their food from the rigors of the workplace. In fact, your lunch pail illustrated your place on the economic scale -- a lunch pail meant you couldn't afford a hot noontime meal. This didn't stop children from wanting to emulate their working parents, however. Soon enough, kids fashioned their own lunch pails from tin boxes that were originally used to hold cookies or tobacco. Early mass-produced lunch pails for children resembled picnic baskets and featured illustrations of kids playing.

With increasing industrialization resulting in Americans working outside the home in factories, it became unfeasible to go home to lunch every day, thus it was necessary to have something to protect and transport a meal. Since the 19th century, American industrial workers have used sturdy containers to hold hardy lunches, consisting of foods such as hard-boiled eggs, vegetables, meat, coffee, and pie.
For a start, the rituals of eating were going to have to change to accommodate the hot, languid days and nights. In the heat of the day lunch became a much lighter meal – but what to call it? Somehow, the word that seemed to stick was "tiffin", taken from the slang words "tiff", a tot of diluted liquor, and "tiffing", to take a sip of this liquor (perhaps a hint that a sahib's lunch might quite often be of the liquid variety!). Tiffin took off and "a spot of tiffin" soon became a peg on which almost any culinary indulgence between breakfast and dinner could be