Edible histories: the full English breakfast

“A COOKED BREAKFAST MANAGES TO TRANSCEND SOCIAL CLASS IN A WAY THAT FEW OTHER ENGLISH FOODS EVER WILL”

It’s hard to trust a single word written by Kenelm Digby, one of the more colourful characters in the history of food writing. Lying was, it was said, “his infirmity”. Did he really fake his own death to avoid sleeping with the King of France’s mum? Did he really kill a man on a Paris street? Did the ‘powder of sympathy’ gifted to him by a mysterious monk really heal wounds from a distance? Questionable at best. One of Digby’s claims is, however, irrefutable. “Two poched eggs with a few fine dry-fryed collops of pure bacon are not bad for break-fast,” he wrote in a recipe collection published in 1669. And very few among us have since found cause to argue.

Eggs and bacon are the twin pillars of the full English breakfast – a world-famous dish that manages to be both universally familiar and impossible to define without sparking a row (let’s go with the 1964 US Supreme Court test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it”). The inhabitants of these islands have been breeding pigs and chickens, curing bacon, stuffing sausages and turning blood into black pudding since long before ‘England’ was even a thing, so our affinity for salty, fatty pork mopped through a slick of golden yolk has deep roots. But the idea of consuming them first thing in the morning is fairly new. When it came to matters of breakfast, Kenelm Digby was ahead of his time.

In medieval England, the national breakfast was nothing like the bulky fry-up of our collective imagination. For most people, the first meal of the day (usually eaten late in the morning after several hours out in the fields) consisted of bread, porridge or gruel, washed down with weak ale: cheap fuel for grinding labour. As towns and cities grew, creating jobs that dragged workers away from the home, breakfast shifted back to the start of the day. Still, though, the bacon-and-eggs era was a distance away. For example, the breakfasts recorded in Samuel Pepys’s diaries in the 1660s consisted mainly of random leftovers, plus an array of foods ranging from mince pies to radishes, with just a single mention of eggs. It wasn’t until the 18^th and 19^th centuries that a more expansive, protein-heavy take on breakfast began to take shape – and for all the apparent earthiness of a full English, it did so in the vast kitchens of the moneyed elite. Like brown sauce from a crusty bottle, it glooped down very slowly from there.

For most of our history, only the rich have had the means to enjoy meat and eggs on a regular basis. As the industrial revolution and Britain’s growing empire made the rich richer and more numerous, spectacular multi-dish breakfasts became an important signifier of status. In Imperial England, if you didn’t have dozens of plates, a dedicated ‘breakfast room’ to serve them in and a battery of servants rising at 4am to prepare them from scratch, who even were you?

Eggs and bacon are present in just about every description of these sprawling country house breakfasts, as are many other elements of the modern full English: sausages, mushrooms and lots of buttered toast, each golden slice crisped to perfection on the end of a toasting fork. But alongside them, and afforded equal importance, are a bewildering list of other dishes. Always several fish – mackerel, whiting, herring. Probably some sheep’s kidneys, veal pies and collared pig’s face. An entire table of cold joints: ham, tongue, beef, poultry. In Georgiana Hill’s The Breakfast Book (1865), the long list of “things most commonly served” includes bloaters, brain cakes, devilled bones, caviar and curries.

What’s notable about many of these dishes is their contrast to the fussy Gallic refinement of an aristocrat’s evening fare. These were solid, substantial foods; an expression of Victorian English virtues: plain, robust, not in any way feminine or French – the culinary equivalent of a cold bath, a violent ball sport or an early morning hunt; the kind of food that a true man of the empire needed in his stomach, ready for a hard day of exploiting the poor.

Cajoled by the likes of Mrs Beeton’s kajillion-selling Book of Household Management, Britain’s growing middle class aspired to the ways of the country house set – and that meant breaking the fast with something grander than bread or porridge. But if you didn’t have a vast kitchen, a dedicated breakfast room and a battery of servants, and if the man of the house had to be at work for 9am, you might have to edit things down a bit. Bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms and toast (especially after the invention of the toaster in the early 1900s) all had the benefit of being easy to cook on a small domestic stove but still suggestive of a certain status. Gradually, the fried breakfast in its more limited form began to establish a presence everywhere from grand hotels and public-school refectories to factory canteens and cheap boarding houses. Lodging in a grotty Wigan terrace in 1936, George Orwell was fed “two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and bread-and-butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumbmarks on it”. Mrs Beeton would have shuddered.

Snobbish cookery writers, aghast at corners being cut, wailed at the shunning of sweetbreads, cod’s roe and fricasseed fowl. As Colonel Arthur Kenney Herbert wrote in the introduction to Fifty Breakfasts (1894): “The ding-dong monotony of ‘bacon and eggs’ alternated with ‘eggs and bacon’ of many English breakfast tables is wholly inexcusable.” That monotony was finally broken by the Second World War, but not in a good way, as strict rationing of bacon and eggs condemned us once again to be a nation of porridge eaters. As Ambrose Heath reported in Good Breakfasts (1940): “The lack of bacon has disturbed our native breakfast dish and brought doubt and distress into many an early morning kitchen.” Forget the Blitz – this was the true national crisis.

The end of rationing in the 1950s after more than a decade of restrictions coincided with significant social change. The rapid industrialisation of food production, plus a marked narrowing of wealth inequality (since dramatically reversed), meant that cooking the odd lavish fry-up at home, or even eating out for breakfast, became a plausible option for just about everyone. Market cafes, transport caffs, 24-hour diners and other ‘greasy spoon’ establishments (an expression that, like the squeezy bottles of ketchup on their nailed-down tables, was – sad to report – an American import) sprang up in every town, offering strong tea, fast service and gut-busting breakfasts. The challenge of the full English is that so many components need to come together at once. At home, bacon, egg and toast might bring you close to capacity. But eating out, you could go the full hog, quite literally.

In these cafes, elements that had no precedent within the breakfast feasts of the Victorian elite began to find their place on the plate. Fried potatoes, fried bread and bubble and squeak added breadth and ballast while also using up the previous day’s leftovers. Baked beans also forced themselves into the reckoning. Heinz beans, imported from America, had initially been sold at Fortnum & Mason in 1901 as a luxury food, but after the first British-made beans rolled off the new Heinz production line in Harlesden in 1928, had embedded themselves as a cheap, convenient staple of working class kitchens and a popular addition to the fry-up, adding lubrication and much-needed fibre to the piles of fatty meat.

One of the ironies inherent to the unstoppable march of the English breakfast was that, particularly in big cities, the greasy spoons that drove its booming popularity were often owned and run by people whose cultural heritage lay far beyond England – primarily Italians, Cypriots and Turks, but also many Bangladeshis and Chinese. Maria’s Market Cafe at Borough Market, one of the true survivors of the golden age of the caff, was one of the many London caffs with Italian roots. After moving to the capital in the early 1960s, the Moruzzi family opened the Borough Cafe on Park Street. The market back then was a vast fruit and veg wholesale operation staffed by hundreds of burly porters, and many of the cafe’s regulars would be coming off a night shift, proving that a full English doesn’t have to be the first meal of the working day – it can also be the last. Under the management of Maria Moruzzi, the cafe that now bears her name moved to the heart of the revitalised retail market in 2012. Maria retired in 2021 with more than 50 years of service under her apron, but the Moruzzi legacy lives on in a classic full English breakfast still redolent of Borough Market’s past.

With a clientele that ranges from City executives to delivery drivers, Maria’s embodies the ability of a cooked breakfast to transcend social class in a way that few other English foods ever will. Depending on the setting, a full English can express the country-house grandeur that birthed it or the post-war populism that made it universal. You can buy one for £56 at The Ritz or a fraction of that at Maria’s (with no compromise on quality). You can argue about black pudding or baked beans or whatever bugbear you happen to hold. But whatever your choices, you’ll grasp one of the truths that bind this nation tight: that two eggs with a few fine dry-fried rashers of bacon (plus three or four other elements) are not bad for breakfast.

Borough Market: Edible Histories by Mark Riddaway (Hodder & Stoughton) is available now from The Borough Market Store, in bookshops and online.