Asal Mula Kata Picnic dalam Tradisi dan Sejarah Inggris-UK

The word picnic is also derived from a French term. According to Alan Davidson's magisterial Oxford Companion to Food, the word can first be found in a 17th-century French text (as piquenique), where it refers not to an outdoor feast but to people who have brought their own wine to a restaurant. The term is a combination of the verb piquer (meaning to pick) and the word nique (meaning a small delicacy, treat or trifle).

The word picnic first appears in English texts during the 18th century. The earliest use of the term refers not to an outdoor meal but instead, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to "a fashionable social entertainment in which each person present contributed a share of the provisions". The sense of informality and sharing was there but the great outdoors was not.

By the 1860s, the transformation of the meaning of the word to what we understand a picnic to be was complete - as the OED describes it: "a pleasure party including an excursion to some spot in the country where all partake of a repast out of doors".

The tradition of picnics, if not the word itself, can be traced back to medieval hunting feasts and Renaissance-era country banquets. There was always a grand feast enjoyed outdoors before the hunt began, where pastries, hams and baked meats would have been informally enjoyed al fresco.

The English aristocracy later converted this rustic feast into an elegant, luxurious occasion staged - rather than held impromptu - in a natural setting. Servants loaded up fine china, crystal goblets, delicate linens, fur rugs, tables and chairs on to carriages and journeyed to a forest or meadow. Foods were sumptuous, elaborate affairs prepared by skilled chefs and a great number of kitchen staff. The events could last for days.

Eventually, this tradition passed through the classes and became the picnics of today.

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