Though the meal first appeared in America at Begue’s, a restaurant in New Orleans, in the late 1890s, according to Ternikar the meal is truly a global event served in Germany, Turkey, India, and China, and often has an 'anything goes' approach to menus for an event that’s more about kinship and conversation than a rigid meal. Ternikar . . . include[s] a handful of recipes. . . .She prefers to focus on the social aspect of the meal as opposed to defining the classic brunch. It’s an admirable approach. . . .The result is a book best consumed à la carte.

Publishers Weekly

As Ternikar points out, what distinguishes breakfast from brunch is that breakfast inaugurates a workday, but brunch celebrates the weekend. Chinese enjoyed morning dim sum for centuries, but brunch appears to have arisen in England at the end of the nineteenth century as an outgrowth of hearty late breakfasts offered to hunters returning from an early morning shoot. The novel meal spread quickly to America and became a New Orleans tradition. New York caught on to the practice, and it was at the Waldorf Hotel (or Delmonico’s) where eggs Benedict, now the iconic brunch dish, first appeared. Post-Prohibition Americans typically eschewed daytime drinking until they developed a thirst for now-classic brunch cocktails on the order of the mimosa and the Bloody Mary. Home brunches caught on in the 1930s as a way for tyro cooks to entertain without the fuss of preparing guests a full dinner. Friday brunch has lately invaded upscale Muslim communities.

Booklist

If you love brunch like Ternikar does, you'll find the book is easy to digest and full of flavorful morsels. It's not dry or brittle (or overly academic).

The Post-Standard/Stars

Brunch: A History is another interesting text in The Meal Series in which author Farha Ternikar addresses a meal of more recent history than breakfast, lunch, or supper. Ternikar has provided a descriptive analysis of brunch.... Brunch: A History is a well-researched and fascinating study about a meal that has received, up until now, very little attention. Ternikar has integrated black and white photographs of brunch dishes throughout her text, and she has provided well-organized endnotes, an index and a substantial bibliography. I especially applaud Ternikar’s inclusion of several wonderful brunch recipes, which begs the question: what’s the good of a food study without a few recipes?

Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture

This engaging, informative book traces the history of brunch from its origins as a hunt breakfast for the British elite to the hipster meal par excellence satirized in the television program Portlandia. But the author’s scope extends beyond the Anglo-American world to cover brunch in Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Her impressive array of research sources includes magazines, cookbooks, movies, music, novels (including ‘chick lit’ and social media) which make for a delightful account of the meal that has been called one of life’s great pleasures.

Colleen Taylor Sen, food writer and historian; coauthor/cowriter of Street Food Around the World: An Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Food Culture in India and Curry: A Global History

Why we eat what we eat when we eat are questions that are not always tackled together and rarely is the last one the focal point. In her well-researched and innovative history of brunch, Farha Bano Ternikar leads us through a fascinating culinary journey that ripples out globally over the span of more than a century. When probed through a variety of cultural, social and temporal prisms, the foods and reasons for selecting them become dislodged from our mundane menus to become symbolic markers of an engrossing, wider narrative.

George Solt, assistant professor of History, New York University