Back when the quintessential “ploughman’s lunch” first showed up on English pub menus in the 1950s, diners were served a cold plate of cheese, bread, butter and beer.

You won’t find any booze at Trinity Episcopal Church’s annual Ploughman’s Lunch on Friday (that’s definitely a Kansas thing) but parishioners are still serving up all the hearty components of the traditional harvest-time meal.

“It started in pubs, I think, but the earlier ploughman’s lunch does have its roots in agriculture,” says church volunteer Pat Kehde. “They — women and children, probably — would take food to the people who were working the fields.”

The Ploughman’s Lunch came to Lawrence in 1955, when Trinity parishioners organized a high-tea fundraiser to rebuild their fire-ravaged church.

After a brief stint as a sausage lunch, the annual fundraiser evolved into the Ploughman’s Lunch as we now know it sometime in the mid-1960s, Kehde says, partly because several prominent British church members at the time recalled the meal being served in pubs back home.

This year’s event, slated for 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., has three homemade soups on the menu: white chili with chicken and white beans, Tuscan minestrone, and — Kehde’s personal favorite — French onion.

The meal, at $8 apiece, also comes with cheese, Wheatfield’s bread and homemade apple pie. Lunch is served at 11 a.m., though the annual Trinity Treasures sale (featuring a bevy of handmade goods from sweaters and quilts to holiday decorations like wreaths and stockings) and bake sale will remain open throughout the event.

“We have several members of the church who are real artists,” Kehde says of the Treasures sale, which was added to the program about 40 years back. “It’s very fine needlework and knitting.”

In the lunch’s early years, whole staffs of downtown businesses (law firms, banks and the like) would walk en masse down to Trinity to enjoy a comforting bowl of soup. These days, “now that the firms have moved out west and south,” Kehde says, it’s “not quite as much of a businessperson’s menu.”

But, after half a century or so, it’s still a lot of fun, she says. “You see your friends and the people you know.”

All proceeds from this year’s Ploughman’s Lunch will benefit the Lawrence Interdenominational Nutrition Kitchen (LINK), Douglas County CASA, Health Care Access, Trinity Interfaith Food Pantry and the Willow Domestic Violence Center.