the concept of elevenses

... not, I should say, my own: I'm more of a eat-a-decent-sized-breakfast and it'll last you through to lunchtime person - or through until the evening, sometimes, back in the day when I traveled more than twenty steps to go to work.  But Alice almost always has what she thinks of as a "second breakfast" - and what I would call elevenses (and she does sometimes), if we didn't get up so early that it's usually consumed somewhere around 9.

Elevenses is really a very British, not American, concept.  It seems - according to the OED - only to have come into use in the late C19th, and often in conjunction with "fourses" - eleven and four being the time that workers broke for refreshment.  Then by the 1920s it was a much more middle-class term: I suspect that Winnie the Pooh had something to do with this ("Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning...").  Apparently in The Lord of the Rings "elevenses" is the third meal of the day eaten by hobbits - but since I only ever got three pages into that - and that was a struggle - I doubt that rubbed off on me.

But what I don't remember is what constituted elevenses when I was small.  At school - pre-11 - it was warm milk in triangular cartons, which put me off milk for life, and very doughy, yeasty buns (which put me off both buns and currants). At home - what?  I doubt I managed to force down milk in any form, and I didn't drink coffee until well into my teens, and tea was for tea-time (not that I drink that, voluntarily, either).  I'm sure my mother had a cup of Nescafe, or Maxwell House - nasty powdered instant coffee, in other words - which I would drink at the riding stables, but not at home.  So I probably ate something - a Club biscuit?  A Lyons Individual Swiss Roll?  But that sounds more like teatime.  I'm puzzled - but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been toast.  A chocolate digestive biscuit, maybe?