Captain Thomas Williamson, in his The East India Vade-Mecum, describes ‘tiffin’ as a little avant dinner taken at 1.00 or 2.00 p.m., a time which remained unchanged right up until India’s independence from British rule. The word ‘tiffin’ itself is thought to be derived from ‘tiffing’, an eighteenth-century English slang term for ‘sipping’.
