The English Breakfast
I have written about breakfast meals before specifically the racially loaded story of Kellogg’s. Now cereal and diary is not necessarily my favourite breakfast although it has certainly a lot of nutritional value if you control what goes inside it. Cereals from the supermarket are nutritious for packing a hefty sugar punch which does not contribute to a good start of the day. A breakfast you can wake me up for is an Eggs Benedict or Royale.
The standoff of cereals vs. Eggs Benedict is similar to a standoff of cote de boeuf vs. a burger, a matter of luxury and pragmatism.
One breakfast that, and you might disagree, covers both bases is the English Breakfast. The good old English fry-up, is both luxurious and filling. It can be found anywhere from The Dorchester for 38GBP and at Weatherspoon’s (a pub chain) on the corner for 5GBP.
The 'common' full English breakfast is a substantial meal consisting of back bacon , eggs, British sausage , baked beans, bubble and squeak, fried tomato, fried
mushrooms, black pudding , with fried and toasted bread on the side.
One of the cornerstones of the English breakfast is the sourcing of the ingredients with emphasis on locally sourced ingredients. The English Breakfast Society says:
These ingredients may vary depending on where in the Great Britain you happen to be and are a subject that is still open to (sometimes quite fierce) debate, we acknowledge this, so please stop writing to us saying that they are wrong, these are the right ingredients in our learned opinion.
The Southern English however would tell you that black pudding is something that was inherited from the Scottish, but the truth is that in the North of the country black pudding is widely consumed and viewed as an essential part of the traditional full English breakfast.
If your breakfast contains cheap, fried, imported, frozen bacon and sausages, it's not a real English breakfast. The hallmark of a real English breakfast is locally or regionally sourced ingredients sourced from farmers, sausage makers and butchers located in Great Britain, but if you happen to be overseas you are forgiven for using locally sourced pork instead. We cannot always get the breakfast we want.
A somewhat fitting snobby introduction to the stature of this globally recognised breakfast. During my time in the UK I can safely state that the majority of Brits adore the full English and foreigners are not necessarily convinced by it. I absolutely love it. Everyday after my night shift at the De Vere Estate Hotel in Selsdon I would walk down the street and have my English Breakfast at the Weatherspoon’s. A good shot at getting your calories for a whole day covered as I was mostly sleeping during the day, like a bear in hibernation
Where other countries are eating their pastries and bread, the English do it bigger. Where did that start? Let’s find out.
Gentry
The basis of the English Breakfast lies at the English Gentry. While a class below the English Nobility the Gentry lived similar to the nobles. A large part of their income came from rent as they owned large country estates. The gentry farmed some of their land and exploited minerals such as coal and mills but leased most of their land to farmers.
The country houses they owned where important social hubs of local society. The Gentry thought that breakfast was the most important meal of the day as well as an important social activity. A way to show the quality of the land in its meat, vegetables, eggs and diary. It was in the houses of the Gentry that the English Breakfast was born. At the time a luxurious breakfast as eggs were not widely available and the breakfast for a commoner was porridge. The gentry saw it as their duty to keep alive the practices, values, culture and cuisine of the traditional Anglo-Saxon country lifestyle.
The gentry were famous for their breakfast feasts and in the old Anglo-Saxon tradition of hospitality, used to provide hearty full breakfasts for visitors passing through, friends, relatives and neighbours. They liked to indulge in 'full English breakfasts' before they went out to hunt, before a long journey, the morning after their regular parties and also when welcoming new arrivals to the estate.
The table would be set with the finest cutlery and cockery and various dishes would be presented;
baked halibut steaks, fried whiting, stewed figs, pheasant legs, broiled kidneys, pulled fowl, sheep’s tongues, potted pigeons, collared tongue, kidneys on toast, sausages with fried bread, pigs cheek and Melton pork pie, as well as the more familiar pork sausages, blood sausages, and bacon made in a regionally traditional way
(English Breakfast Society)
The Decline of The Gentry
In the late 1800’s Britain was in an agricultural crisis. The main reason for this crisis was the opening of American prairies for cultivation which flooded the Western European markets with cheap grain. The Netherlands and the UK didn’t recover from these cheap imports until after the Second World War. Together with the introduction in the 20th century of increasingly heavy levels of taxation on inherited wealth, put an end to agricultural land as the primary source of wealth for the upper classes and so many estates were sold or broken up. Many of today’s estates are privately owned by institutions and are often used for hotels and museums. And so I get myself got to work in one of these estates namely the one in Selsdon which was once owned by the Earl of Alfred, one of the Queen’s ancestors (RIP). Fun fact the Selsdon Mansion was worth around 1000 shillings or 1 pound today.
Victorian Times
The Victorian Era was a time where a lot of wealth was created. Traditions where flattened to cater to different social classes, this was evident in the celebration of Christmas (check our Christmas edit). The English Breakfast had also reached the lower and middle classes. The lower classes regularly started eating a fry-up as it was a solid energy provider before the hard factory labour.
The newly rich saw the idea of the gentry as the social model to aspire towards. Those seeking to advance themselves socially studied the habits of the gentry, the traditions of their country houses and adopted their notion of the English breakfast as an important social event. For wealthy Victorians it was the Gentry to aspire to in an urban and industrial environment. Similar to nowadays where wealthy urbanites would read magazines like “Country Life”
The Rise of The English Breakfast
After World War II, the English Breakfast but namely eggs and bacon became literally a household name in English culture. It was widely available in all parts of the British Empire like in Mumbai. It was estimated that by the 1950’s more than half of the population ate this breakfast. Companies were fighting to be the staple of an English breakfast. Heinz introduced canned bake beans
And HP sauce
A controversial addition to the English Breakfast are hashbrowns. They don’t have the appearance of something that comes from the land of the Gentry. Chairman of the English Breakfast Society, Guise Bule says the following:
The hash brown is controversial. A lot of cafes have started to introduce it as filler, It’s cheap and American. We here at the Society believe that frozen hash browns and french fries are used as a cheap breakfast plate filler, served by people who probably buy cheap imported bacon and sausages to use in their so called English breakfasts, and who have probably never heard of bubble and squeak.
Manners?
The words English Breakfast contain breakfast which should indicate that the meal has to be eaten at the start of the day. However this is not true, it can be enjoyed at anytime of the day even as dinner. It is served at family and social gatherings and thereby it is tradition to have a newspaper with you and ignore the rest of the table reading the daily affairs. Traditions and the Brits, how familiar.