Extra "the" in "In the evening, my mother and I cooked the dinner"

Question

My name's Elsie Jackson. I'm eighty-nine years old. I was at school eighty years ago! Every morning I helped my mother. We lived on a farm, and sometimes I milked the cows. I walked eight kilometers to school. School started at eight o'clock. I learned reading, writing and math. And then I walked home with all my brothers and sisters. In the evening, my mother and I cooked the dinner. We didn’t watch TV, but we played games.

SOURCE

Shouldn't it be:

In the evening, my mother and I cooked dinner.

Grammar reference:

We do not normally use the with breakfast/lunch/dinner:

• What did you have for breakfast?
• We had lunch in a very nice restaurant.

Raymond Murphy, English Grammar in Use, Fourth edition, Page 146

Answer 1

I personally would not use "the" in the sentence, since the narration refers to the usual cycle/habitual action during Elsie's early years (when she's nine years old).

BUT

Because the narration also gives specific actions, I take it that the author wants to point out that Elsie is specifically cooking dinner, and that she's not cooking eggs, nor "midnight" meal, nor any other meal/cuisine or equivalent. Nothing (else) but dinner.

Note:

I think it's best to add @user3169's comment here.

"Dinner could be countable or uncountable. That specific dinner, or the meal you eat in the evening in general. In your example, it is talking about general activities, so I would expect no article (other than for emphasis perhaps)."

Answer 2

There is nothing inherently wrong with using the article before dinner in the line:

In the evening, my mother and I cooked the dinner.

You could argue that the definite article is unnecessary, that it adds nothing of value, but it is perfectly grammatical. If the question asked had been, ‘is it redundant?’ then I would have replied ‘probably’.

Looking for evidence of usage on Google Ngrams, we find in the British English corpus (2009), the results for cooked the dinner, cooked dinner

and the American English corpus (2009) produces the following graph for cooked the dinner (blue), cooked dinner (red)

• It seemed such a long, long time since her mother had told her that she might gather some bush flowers while she cooked the dinner, and Dot recollected how she was bid not to go out of sight of the cottage

• He cooked the dinner, sat down on the bench, and was smoking his pipe, when up came the old man riding in a mortar with a pestle to prop it up and a seven-arshin long plank for sleeping

• Raymond arranged and cooked the dinner and left the rest of the last minute details to his mother and grandmother.

According to Google Ngrams, there are several instances of cooked the dinner, but cook dinner is by far the most common usage. I suspect that in certain dialects the difference is less marked.

Answer 3

Yes, in your example, it should be without the extra "the."

We would have included "the" if the speaker had been talking about a specific dinner.

However, she had been speaking about a habit of "cooking dinner," so "the" is not necessary.