Recipe - Brookes' Ploughmans

A Ploughman’s lunch is an English cold meal which consists of cheese, pickle, and bread. As its name suggests, it is more commonly consumed at midday.

English literature students might know…

Pierce the Ploughman's Crede (c.1394), a medieval alliterative poem of 855 lines lampooning the four orders of friars, mentions the traditional ploughman's meal of bread, cheese and beer. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the first recorded use of the phrase "ploughman's lunch" as 1837, from the book Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott by John G. Lockhart, but this early use may have meant merely the sum of its parts, "a lunch for a ploughman".*

Serves 5

Ingredients

40g thinly sliced cheddar cheese
15g Branston pickle
1 sliced pickled onion
3 slices vine ripened tomato
10g Iceberg lettuce
10g mayonnaise
5 small baguettes

1. Slice the baguettes in half, lengthways, being careful not to cut all the way through.
2. Spread the inside of the bottom of the baguette with mayonnaise
3. Spread the inside of the top of the baguette with Branston Pickle
4. Layer with Iceberg lettuce, the sliced tomato, sliced Cheddar cheese, then sliced pickled onion

Recipe by Dan Ostler - Executive Chef at Brookes

*Courtesy of Wikipedia – we assume it’s accurate, but you may want to check – or do some other research!