English

Noun

kitchen supper ‎(plural kitchen suppers)

1. (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.‎

2. 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 usage examples of 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]

References

1. ↑ Moore, Charles (2012-03-30), “Even I’m starting to wonder: what do this lot know about anything?”, in The Daily Telegraph
2. ↑ Mount, Harry (2012-03-29), “The class war is still raging across the dining table”, in The Daily Telegraph