04-23-2022, 02:19 PM
Nobody in England eats a “Full English Breakfast”, when they’re catering for themselves. They just make breakfast.
Just as Cornish housewives would send their men down the tin-mine with a pasty, rather than a “Cornish pasty”, and Americans do not feel the need to call their national sport “American football”. We can take it as a rule of thumb that nicknames indicating a place of origin are not normally used IN the place of origin, which rather gives the game away.
The Full English Breakfast as it is known today is a commercial product consumed by tourists, from home or abroad, and created by the establishments which cater for them.
The starting-point must have been “bacon and eggs”, a simple and convenient meal in farming circles, and certainly not unique to England. I notice that Edward Lear was fed with macaroni, scrambled eggs, and bacon by one peasant family during his tour of Calabria.
Another intriguing literary reference comes from “Wild Wales”. George Borrow was told at a hostelry that they had not much to offer him for dinner except for bacon and eggs. His reply was “I will have the bacon and eggs with tea and bread-and-butter, not forgetting a pint of ale- in a word, I will box Harry”. The words “box Harry” prompted the lady to assume that he must be “a commercial gent”. Later in the chapter, he admits that he has never been able to discover where the expression came from. Google hasn’t either. My own theory is that it comes from “old Harry”, meaning the devil, and here representing the pangs of hunger. That simple meal is just enough to stifle the pangs and put old Harry back in his box. Anyway, that meal (probably, but not necessarily, omitting the pint of ale) is recognisable as a fairly standard English breakfast of the twentieth century.
The obvious reference point on cookery questions is “what mother used to make”. We frequently had fried breakfasts cooked on a small gas stove in a caravan somewhere in the heart of Scotland. I remember the typical meal as eggs, bacon, halves of tomato, and fried bread. The bread had a large footprint in the pan, so it would be cooked first and then kept warm in the grill space under the gas-rings. My mother was cooking in lard, which remained in the pan to be topped up and used again the following day. For me, a well-cooked slice of bread saturated with bacon-flavoured lard is part of the authentic taste of a fried breakfast.
There would also be a pot of tea on the table, of course, and jars of things to be spread on the bread-and-butter. Jam (probably Hartleys); marmalade (probably Robertson’s Golden Shred, labelled with the cheerful and now banned golliwog figure); frequently lemon curd; perhaps Marmite. I remember Dad picking up a jar of Whisky marmalade on one trip.
Let’s notice some of the things that are missing from this menu.
Baked beans. The whole point of a fried breakfast is doing everything in one pan. Beans would have required an extra saucepan, so they were more likely to appear later in the day.
Mushrooms. We would not have seen mushrooms on sale before supermarkets came along. If we had been sure about the difference between (edible) mushrooms and (poisonous) toadstools, we might have been able to find them in the woods.
Black pudding. We were not northerners.
Hash browns, or potato in any other form. We were not Americans. And we did not have domestic freezers. In fact the caravan didn’t even have a refrigerator.
That was what happened in domestic life. I’m convinced that the modern “Full English Breakfast” is a commercial development driven by the competitive needs of bed-and-breakfast landladies.
It would have begun in the Sixties. More families then were taking their summer holidays “on the Continent”, as we say. They discovered that hotels there tended to serve an uncooked breakfast, which made the uncooked breakfast more fashionable. In order to compete with this trend, the lodgings in English resorts began offering what they would call a “Continental breakfast”, even if it wasn’t much more than coffee and a basket-full of croissants. But this meant they also needed a proper name for the traditional option. Otherwise the waitress would have come out sounding like the dialogue on a saucy McGill postcard; “Will you take the Continental breakfast, or do you want a bit of the other?” So that, I think, is the real origin of the term “English breakfast”.
It's important to note that “Full-English” is a single expression, pronounced almost as a single word. I’m sure anyone who has ever heard it in situ will back me up on that point. “English” means “not-Continental”, and one implication of the word “full” is “not uncooked”. So part of the original meaning of ”Do you want the Full-English” was “Do you want the native cooked breakfast instead of the exotic coffee and croissants?” But the expression also covers the fact that the plated meal itself is not the entire breakfast; it embraces the tea or coffee, your opening cereal and/or fruit juice, and the toast and accompaniments, which are all included in the concept and the price.
Then over the decades, in competition with each other, they began giving extra value to the word “full”, taking it as meaning that more items should be piled onto the main plate. Hence the combination of bacon and sausage, the addition of baked beans, mushrooms, hash browns, whatever they could think of.
But I think the addition of black pudding must come from the food theorists, who seem to have turned it into something of a gourmet item. I have stayed in bed-and-breakfast houses from Oban round to Caernarvon (clockwise, of course), and I have never yet seen black pudding on a breakfast menu. Having said that, I’ve never been to Blackpool.
On the other hand, ironically, the one item that often disappears from the social media version of the menu is fried bread. Undoubtedly authentic, very capable of making the plate “full”, but not trendy enough. Health reasons, I suppose.
So it seems to me that the Full English Breakfast which I now find celebrated on You-tube or even mentioned on ATS has become something of an artificial meme (if that’s the right word). The act of eating an overly-full platter is presented as a challenge, although essential features like tea and toast have been left out of the equation. I would say that the Britishness of that experience is a little forced. If you want to share the authentic taste of British culture at the breakfast table, all you really need to do is to box Harry.
Just as Cornish housewives would send their men down the tin-mine with a pasty, rather than a “Cornish pasty”, and Americans do not feel the need to call their national sport “American football”. We can take it as a rule of thumb that nicknames indicating a place of origin are not normally used IN the place of origin, which rather gives the game away.
The Full English Breakfast as it is known today is a commercial product consumed by tourists, from home or abroad, and created by the establishments which cater for them.
The starting-point must have been “bacon and eggs”, a simple and convenient meal in farming circles, and certainly not unique to England. I notice that Edward Lear was fed with macaroni, scrambled eggs, and bacon by one peasant family during his tour of Calabria.
Another intriguing literary reference comes from “Wild Wales”. George Borrow was told at a hostelry that they had not much to offer him for dinner except for bacon and eggs. His reply was “I will have the bacon and eggs with tea and bread-and-butter, not forgetting a pint of ale- in a word, I will box Harry”. The words “box Harry” prompted the lady to assume that he must be “a commercial gent”. Later in the chapter, he admits that he has never been able to discover where the expression came from. Google hasn’t either. My own theory is that it comes from “old Harry”, meaning the devil, and here representing the pangs of hunger. That simple meal is just enough to stifle the pangs and put old Harry back in his box. Anyway, that meal (probably, but not necessarily, omitting the pint of ale) is recognisable as a fairly standard English breakfast of the twentieth century.
The obvious reference point on cookery questions is “what mother used to make”. We frequently had fried breakfasts cooked on a small gas stove in a caravan somewhere in the heart of Scotland. I remember the typical meal as eggs, bacon, halves of tomato, and fried bread. The bread had a large footprint in the pan, so it would be cooked first and then kept warm in the grill space under the gas-rings. My mother was cooking in lard, which remained in the pan to be topped up and used again the following day. For me, a well-cooked slice of bread saturated with bacon-flavoured lard is part of the authentic taste of a fried breakfast.
There would also be a pot of tea on the table, of course, and jars of things to be spread on the bread-and-butter. Jam (probably Hartleys); marmalade (probably Robertson’s Golden Shred, labelled with the cheerful and now banned golliwog figure); frequently lemon curd; perhaps Marmite. I remember Dad picking up a jar of Whisky marmalade on one trip.
Let’s notice some of the things that are missing from this menu.
Baked beans. The whole point of a fried breakfast is doing everything in one pan. Beans would have required an extra saucepan, so they were more likely to appear later in the day.
Mushrooms. We would not have seen mushrooms on sale before supermarkets came along. If we had been sure about the difference between (edible) mushrooms and (poisonous) toadstools, we might have been able to find them in the woods.
Black pudding. We were not northerners.
Hash browns, or potato in any other form. We were not Americans. And we did not have domestic freezers. In fact the caravan didn’t even have a refrigerator.
That was what happened in domestic life. I’m convinced that the modern “Full English Breakfast” is a commercial development driven by the competitive needs of bed-and-breakfast landladies.
It would have begun in the Sixties. More families then were taking their summer holidays “on the Continent”, as we say. They discovered that hotels there tended to serve an uncooked breakfast, which made the uncooked breakfast more fashionable. In order to compete with this trend, the lodgings in English resorts began offering what they would call a “Continental breakfast”, even if it wasn’t much more than coffee and a basket-full of croissants. But this meant they also needed a proper name for the traditional option. Otherwise the waitress would have come out sounding like the dialogue on a saucy McGill postcard; “Will you take the Continental breakfast, or do you want a bit of the other?” So that, I think, is the real origin of the term “English breakfast”.
It's important to note that “Full-English” is a single expression, pronounced almost as a single word. I’m sure anyone who has ever heard it in situ will back me up on that point. “English” means “not-Continental”, and one implication of the word “full” is “not uncooked”. So part of the original meaning of ”Do you want the Full-English” was “Do you want the native cooked breakfast instead of the exotic coffee and croissants?” But the expression also covers the fact that the plated meal itself is not the entire breakfast; it embraces the tea or coffee, your opening cereal and/or fruit juice, and the toast and accompaniments, which are all included in the concept and the price.
Then over the decades, in competition with each other, they began giving extra value to the word “full”, taking it as meaning that more items should be piled onto the main plate. Hence the combination of bacon and sausage, the addition of baked beans, mushrooms, hash browns, whatever they could think of.
But I think the addition of black pudding must come from the food theorists, who seem to have turned it into something of a gourmet item. I have stayed in bed-and-breakfast houses from Oban round to Caernarvon (clockwise, of course), and I have never yet seen black pudding on a breakfast menu. Having said that, I’ve never been to Blackpool.
On the other hand, ironically, the one item that often disappears from the social media version of the menu is fried bread. Undoubtedly authentic, very capable of making the plate “full”, but not trendy enough. Health reasons, I suppose.
So it seems to me that the Full English Breakfast which I now find celebrated on You-tube or even mentioned on ATS has become something of an artificial meme (if that’s the right word). The act of eating an overly-full platter is presented as a challenge, although essential features like tea and toast have been left out of the equation. I would say that the Britishness of that experience is a little forced. If you want to share the authentic taste of British culture at the breakfast table, all you really need to do is to box Harry.
