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History and Social Context
Throughout history, most people partook of a simple breakfast. This was as much to stimulate the stomach for the rest of the day’s meals as it was to provide nourishment to begin the day’s labor. Even today, most of the world begins the day with naught more than a warm liquid (tea, coffee, soup) and a grain (porridge, toast, cereal). Throughout history, though, breakfast was not always so simple.
Etymology
Before its elevation in status to the meal of utmost necessity, the term “breakfast” was rife with befuddlement and confusion. Until relatively recently, lunch was the first meal of the day, but it was called dinner. The English word “breakfast,” derived from the French disdéjeuner (via late-Latin disieiunare; translating to “un-fast,” or break the fast) was contracted in Romance languages to disnare or Old French disner in the 11th century, and eventually found its way to the English word dinner.1 This shift in word use apparently came with the 13th-century shift of the main meal of the day (dinner) from midday to evening—dinner’s present-day timeslot. This is not to be confused with 13th-century “supper,” defined as “the last meal of the day.”
The modern French word déjeuner means lunch, and other early words for breakfast, including the Spanish almuerzo (from the Latin admordere, meaning “to bite”), eventually shifted in meaning toward lunch as well. The present-day French phrase for breakfast, petit déjeuner, relegates the meal to a “small lunch.” To confuse matters further, the modern Italian word for breakfast, colazione, is derived from the Latin word that initially meant “a light supper”: collationem (now means “to bring together”; collation). Colazione may be further distinguished between prima colazione (“first breakfast”) and seconda colazione (“second breakfast,” or lunch). However, lunch is more commonly referred to as pranzo, which can mean either lunch or dinner.
It was not until the 15th century that “breakfast” came into use in written English to describe a morning meal, but it is unclear why it took so long to catch on. Either people did not eat it—and the startling dearth of written records would suggest this—or breakfast was obscured by the written accounts of the midday meals and evening feasts that were deemed more important—by those keeping the records, at least.
Prehistory
“It would be hard to overestimate grains . . . in the life of our species,” wrote preeminent food scientist Harold McGee in his 1984 tome On Food and Cooking.2 People have been eating foods typically associated with breakfast since the Paleolithic period, when humans first began to use stone querns to grind grains.3 Twelve thousand years ago, rice (Oryza sativa) was domesticated in the Yangtze River Valley of China; across Asia today, cereals still make up roughly 70–80 percent of total caloric intake.4 A rice porridge called congee has been eaten in China for thousands of years, though the original version of congee was likely made from broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), one of the Chinese Five Cereals.5 Mentions of millet congee are recorded by China’s mythic Yellow Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, during his reign in the 2700s BCE.
Starting in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, the domestication of the eight so-called founder crops, of which three are cereals—emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), einkorn wheat (Triticum boeoticum), and barley (Hordeum vulgare)—revolutionized humankind by introducing us to the sedentary lifestyle that allowed the luxury of leisure time.6 (Four of the other founder crops, though not cereals, are legumes that eventually found their way into breakfast porridges.) Rather than following food around (it would also be hard to overestimate meat in the life of the human species), early humans suddenly had time for sophisticated tool development and social organization. Much of what defines humanity—the capacity for complex language, intellectual reasoning, and artistic expression—may not have developed so fully had we remained nomadic hunter-gatherers. The domestication of grain was the major driving force in human cultural evolution.
The domestication of grain also culminated in the intricacies of the modern market system. Maize was a primary component of the socioeconomic development of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.7 Although the earliest maize fossils date back to around 5000 BCE, pollen and starch analysis indicates that maize domestication may have taken place even earlier—as early as 5800 BCE. The domestication of maize has been cited as a factor in the development of sophisticated Mesoamerican societies. Accordingly, maize has been central to Aztec, Tolmec, and Maya mythologies.
By 3000 BCE, alphabet systems and the use of arithmetic were invented as a means of logging grain transactions. Another important consequence of the domestication of cereals was the development of controlled fermentation. The fermentation of barley into beer dates back in Neolithic Europe to as early as 3000 BCE, although the history of beer dates as far as 6000 BCE in the Middle East.8 The earliest records of Mesopotamian writing in 4000 BCE contain references to beer.9 As water was typically of dubious quality, beer would go on to become the preferred breakfast beverage during the Middle Ages.
Timucua Indians planting maize, 1591. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Rye (Secale cereale) and oats (Avena Sativa) were cultivated in Europe starting in the early Neolithic in Anatolia before spreading to the rest of Europe in the Iron and Bronze Ages, and brown rye breads still dominate the northern and eastern European baking landscape.10 Oat porridge has been found in northern Europe in the stomach contents of 5000-year-old Neolithic bog bodies—perfectly preserved to tanned leather by the low pH of the sphagnum.11 Since it is widely speculated that bog bodies were victims of either human sacrifice or execution as punishment for crime, it may be presumed that these hapless victims were of lower socioeconomic status, and for whom humble porridges were a daily staple.
Classical Antiquity
Ample written record supports the notion that Ancient Romans had a three-meals-a-day (plus an afternoon snack) routine similar to that of today’s United States and Europe, though the times for these meals shifted around plenty, depending on who was doing the telling. The Roman breakfast known as jentaculum (or ientaculum) was always consumed in the morning, however, and usually comprised everyday staples like bread, cheese, olives, salad, nuts, dried grapes, and cold meat left over from the night before.12
Depending on their resources, Romans may have included milk, eggs, and mulsum with their morning meal. Mulsum was a mixture of wine and honey; to add aromatic spices including cassia (Cassia fistulosa; a cinnamon relative), myrrh (Myrrhis odorata), nard (Nardostachys jadamansi; a ginseng relative), costum (Chrysanthemum balsamita), saffron (Crocus sativus), or pepper (Piper nigrum) turned mulsum to Conditum Paradoxum, which was often served at celebrations, but sometimes enjoyed with breakfast.13 If the wine was flavored, jentaculum was sometimes called silatum after the word selis (the old Latin name of Seseli spp.), an umbelliferous herb also known as moon carrot, which was used to enhance the breakfast wine.14 According to 1st-century Latin poet Martial, jentaculum may also have included pastry or other freshly baked goods (rather than simply leftovers) provided by bakers at daybreak, as in the passage, “Surgite: jam vendit peuris jentacula pistor . . . sonant undique lucis aves” (“Get up; the baker is already selling the boys breakfast, as the birdsong and light surround us”).15
Farro was also commonly eaten in a porridge dish called pulmentum (meaning “pottage”), particularly by the lower classes and slaves. In actuality, pulmentum is named for the porridge (puls) that is, not unlike African fufu, merely the vehicle for delivering the real dish—salted meats and/or fish, olives, oil, and vinegar—to the mouth. What exactly defines farro is somewhat nebulous; Pliny the Elder identified millet as the primary grain of puls,16 but the founder crops emmer wheat and einkorn wheat as well as the ancient grain spelt are all called farro in Italy today (from Pliny’s farrago; fodder for cattle, and from which “forage” is apparently derived). There is no evidence that it was strictly breakfast fare; on the contrary, it appears that may have been altogether distinct from breakfast. Plautus mentions puls as a food for young children too young for jentaculum, perhaps before they were able to feed themselves or have at least grown enough teeth for chewing regular food.17
Martial mentioned that jentaculum was eaten at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and 16th-century scholar Claudius Saumaise contradicted that it was typically eaten at 9:00 or 10:00 a.m., but it seems unlikely that any fixed time was truly assigned for this meal.18 More than any hard, written rules, it was likelier the relocation of the other two, larger meals to later in the day that had the largest effect on breakfast’s morning timeslot. The two meals were prandium—equal to today’s pranzo, which was lunch, taken at around 11:00 a.m. or noon—and caesna, or cena (or somewhat less accurately coena),19 which was supper, taken at around 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. An afternoon snack, merenda, eaten between lunch (actually dinner) and supper, was later added once supper was moved from mid-afternoon to later in the evening. This shuffling of mealtimes was a trend that would continue for centuries.
In Roman playwright Plautus’s comedy Curculio (3rd century BCE), the character Phædromus gathers wine and provisions including olives and capers for a pre-dawn “early breakfast” for Planesium, with whom he is desperately in love. The reason Phædromus is providing for his mistress such an odd choice of entertainment is probably that Planesium’s pimp, the Procurer, was not likely to interfere, as he was staying the night in the Temple of Æsculapius. Serving an early breakfast to his love, it seemed, would provide Phædromus with an opportunity for a clandestine sojourn.
In Greek literature fifty years earlier, Homer makes numerous mentions of ariston, a meal taken not long after sunrise. Breakfast preparation seems to have been a necessary, if not comforting, part of the morning ritual for most people at the time. The Iliad notes this meal with regard to a labor-weary woodsman, eager for this light repast to start his day, preparing it even as he is aching with exhaustion. Here, the hunger for breakfast (and willingness to spend energy preparing it, despite utter weariness) is used as a metaphor for the steely determination needed to overpower one’s foes.
The opening prose of the 16th book of The Odyssey (The Discovery of Odysseus) mentions breakfast as the meal being prepared “[in dawn’s] thin light, paying little heed to the barnyard din,” suggesting it was customary to eat in the morning before attending to one’s chores.20 In this scene, swineherd Eumaeus is busily mixing water and wine in a bowl, which he accidentally drops in joyful amazement as his young master Telemachus arrives home safely after a long absence. After fetching Telemachus a suitable chair for the breakfast table, Eumaeus lays out a platter of cold meat left over from the previous night’s supper; this would likely have been all the breakfast a normal day would require, but in celebration of his master’s return, the breakfast wine is instead mixed with honey (in similar fashion to the Roman mulsum, no doubt), and baskets heaped with freshly baked bread are additionally presented.
Eventually, ariston was moved to around noon, and a new morning meal was introduced. In the post-Homeric classical period of Greece, a meal called akratisma was typically consumed immediately after rising in the morning, replacing the now-lunchtime meal ariston.21 This quick nibble consisted of little more than bread dipped in undiluted wine, or akratis, for which the meal was named, different from the watered-down wine of Homer’s time. Again, this was merely a morning morsel to boost energy levels for the day’s chores.
Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Written records of most social and cultural exploits dropped off precipitously in the centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages (Late Antiquity; between the second and eighth centuries), earning this time period the dubious moniker the Dark Ages. Of the records that do exist, many written accounts seem to go to great lengths to admonish eating in the morning.
During medieval times, the monarchy and their entourage could squander entire days around a table, sometimes to the exclusion of all other business. When one considers the gross amount of time that the social elite spent languishing over meals, it begins to make some sense that the morning meal may be the first to be eliminated.
As with most basic human pleasures, gluttony and other indulgences of the flesh were frowned upon during the Middle Ages and fasting was de rigeur. Proper medieval moralists did not need any more sustenance than was provided in the day’s two meals—a light, midday dinner and a more substantial supper for the evening meal; hence, breakfast was considered crass and boorish by the Catholic Church.22 The indulgent reresoper (“rear supper”) of the late evening, a snack associated with copious amounts of wine, was similarly shunned by most decent folk; it seems plausible that at least some of the impetus for breakfast’s censure was due to the amount of ale and wine typically imbibed at the meal. It was presumed that if one ate breakfast, it was because one had other lusty appetites as well.
Conversely, eating breakfast meant that one was poor, and needed precious calories to get to the business of peasantry—a marginally more tolerable reason to eat breakfast. Morning feeding was accepted for low-status farmers and laborers who truly needed the energy to make it through the first few hours of toiling, as well as those too weak to make it to the large, midday dinner—children, the elderly, and the infirm, who were allowed to supplement their meals with porridges.23 Whatever the reason for eating it, breakfast was generally treated with a fair amount of derision.
In 13th-century England, breakfast (when eaten) consisted of little more than a sustaining hunk of rye bread, a bit of cheese, and some ale consumed by regular working stiffs, but by the 15th century even the nobility indulged in a bit of bread, ale, and meat in the hours between waking and dinner, though this was not necessarily considered a proper meal. In Europe, many people had a posset of warm custard mixed with ale or wine upon waking. This was enjoyed while still in the bedchamber, just as modern Parisians take a café au lait with a bit of croissant before getting on with the day, hours before déjeuner.24
Over the centuries, the earlier of the acceptable meals—dinner—was pushed later and later. Tenth-century Normans ate a midmorning meal (not yet called dinner) at around 9:00 a.m.25 A few hundred years later, by the time of the Tudor period (mid-15th century), people were eating dinner at around 11:00 a.m., further lengthening the time between waking and the first meal. Frances I of France, perhaps in light of this ever-widening gap between mealtimes, stuck to the maxim “rise at 5, dine at 9, sup at 5, couch at 9.”26
Though the hour of meals shifted many times throughout the generations, it was generally agreed that meals should nonetheless happen at specific times; anything less than timely was chaotic and savage, so said Sir John Harington, in 1624: “I would not that you should observe a certaine houre, either for dinners or suppers, lest that daily custome should be altered into nature; and after this inter-mission of this custome of nature hurt may follow.”27
Travelers were also apparently granted license to eat breakfast while they were away from home. In March of 1255, six tuns of wine were delivered to Henry III at the cathedral at St. Albans for his breakfast while away on pilgrimage.28 When one considers that a tun is equivalent to approximately 252 gallons of wine, this is astonishing. It seems, then, that if a king was on religious pilgrimage (as he frequently was), not only was the ban on breakfast completely lifted, but supplies were adjusted—often quite zealously, as demonstrated by Henry III’s 1,500 gallons of wine—to compensate for the unpredictable quality at the cook shops or market stalls that would be encountered along the way. If the king were to sin by eating breakfast, he may as well enjoy good tipple while he was at it.
The justification for laborers to eat breakfast came in opposition to the widely held belief that one should never exercise on a full stomach; to do so, it was feared, would result in food entering the bloodstream before it could become sufficiently “concocted.” In fact, 17th-century Strasburg physician Melchior Sebizius warned that without the heat of labor to stimulate digestion and the elimination of wastes through the sweat and breath, the superfluities left in the body would fester into scabies or ulcers.29
Regular men were usually too embarrassed to admit that they ate breakfast, being a meal associated with children, invalids, the elderly, and the working poor. However, the first record of a businessman recording “Expensys in brekfast” occurred in an account log of the court of Edward IV in 1463.30 His financial needs must have helped him overcome his embarrassment. By the early 1600s, recorded expenses for breakfast became customary and more detailed, logging the price, foods eaten, and to whom the invoice should be paid.
Another interesting consideration is that by the 1500s, physicians across Europe consistently warned healthy adults against eating breakfast. It was considered insalubrious to eat before fully digesting the prior meal, lest the “pure” become somatically integrated with the “impure.”31 A brisk morning constitutional was prescribed to get the blood pumping, to produce the body heat needed to facilitate digestion, and perhaps to encourage the other morning constitutional. Perhaps the 16th-century introduction of caffeinated beverages into the European diet was part of the consideration to allow breakfast; coffee and tea famously aid the body in “evacuation of superfluities.” Perhaps this is why coffee and tea were consumed in the morning in the first place.
English author Thomas Wingfield believed breakfast to be necessary among the British, writing in 1551 that although the 2nd-century Roman physiologist Galen never ate breakfast, that “in this Realme” it was necessary.32 Though Wingfield was among the first 16th-century authors to come out in favor of breakfast, he nonetheless echoed the medieval sentiment by suggesting that only babies and the infirm should require a morning meal. Going against convention, Manchester schoolmaster Thomas Cogan wrote in 1589 that it was not only fine to eat breakfast, but that it was unhealthy to miss it, insisting that “[t]o suffer hunger long filleth the stomack with ill humors.” Cogan was among the notable few to identify the need for even healthy, robust people to eat breakfast, rather than reserving it for the very young, the very old, and the choleric, as Wingfield had.
Another author from the British Isles, Thomas Moffett, explains that Scottish people need something wholesome first thing in the morning; if they lack access to fresh, clean air, then a healthful breakfast should be a suitable facsimile.33 This had been construed to mean that anyone living in a filthy city should eat breakfast regularly. In a recurring theme of circumstantial allowance, Moffett goes on to explain that children, choleric people, and laborers should also keep something in their stomachs.
Breakfast was also eaten to stave off the cold. Welsh writer Sir William Vaughan instructed eating hot, buttered bread with cinnamon and sugar and caudles of oatmeal with butter and raisins.34 A caudle was somewhat like a cross between a thin gruel and eggnog, made by combining a starch—in Vaughan’s case oats, but sometimes wheat or breadcrumbs—with honey, raisins, eggs, and wine or ale, and sometimes seasoned with ginger or saffron. A breakfast so hearty surely should have provided enough warmth to Vaughan’s colonists in Newfoundland. Perhaps they paid him no heed: the colony failed.
At least some members of the nobility completely ignored the banter and had breakfast anyway, eating what they liked, when they liked. Queen Elizabeth I, an exceedingly civilized monarch with nothing but disdain for inebriated revelry, was known to be an early riser. During a visit with her cousin Mary of Scots, she arranged a meeting with Mary’s ambassador Sir James Melvil for 8:00 a.m. When he arrived, he found her strolling about the garden, having already tended to her devotions, her other civil affairs, and her breakfast, which consisted of “manchet [a loaf of white bread], ale, beer, wine and a good pottage [stew], like a farmer’s, made of mutton or beef with ‘real bones.’”35
In a different entry in her personal journal, Queen Bess makes pragmatic notes about a less spectacular breakfast: “10 May 1451. Six o’clock. Breakfasted. The buttock of beef rather too much boiled, and the ale a little the stalest. Memorandum: to tell the cook about the first fault, and to mend the second myself by tapping a fresh barrel directly.” 36 That even the judicious queen partook of ale, beer, and wine at breakfast leads one to question just how much consumption it took to make a medieval inebriate.
By the 15th century, it appears that many members of the upper crust either were permitted to eat breakfast or paid no mind to the instructions otherwise. Accounts of what certain earls and duchesses were having for breakfast begin to trickle in at around this time and sometimes even go into great detail about the amount of food being consumed. Following Elizabeth’s example, it would seem that those virtuous early risers were at last granted clearance to eat before dinner, as in this substantial breakfast of one earl and his countess: two loaves of bread, a quart of beer, a quart of wine, two pieces of salt fish, six baconed herrings, four white herrings, or a dish of sprats.37 As described in his 1911 Good Cheer: The Romance of Food and Feasting, English historian Frederick Hackwood does not name the earl and countess; it is possible they were William Paston (2nd Earl of Yarmouth) and his wife Margaret of Norfolk. The Paston Letters document the correspondence between the gentry Pastons in the years between 1422 and 1509, chronicling many historical affairs, as well as a very similar daily breakfast supplied by Margaret to her family: “a machet a quarte of beer a dyshe of butter a pece of saltfisch a dyshe of sproitts or white herrying.”38
In the mid-17th century, Queen Henrietta Maria (wife of King Charles I of England) also enjoyed a pottage every morning, hers consisting of herbed meat broth thickened with toast. Her chancellor and personal chef Kenelm Digby goes into great detail on the recipe, which is included in his posthumously published cookbook, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight Opened. He goes on to recommend finishing the breakfast with two poached eggs and a bit of bacon, an idea he may have borrowed from physician Tobias Venner.39
Even as breakfast foods begin to resemble the modern version of the meal, the same caveats persisted. Though Tobias Venner recommends a sensible breakfast of “a couple of poached eggs, sprinkled with vinegar, seasoned with black pepper and salt, served with bread-and-butter and completed with a draught of claret (wine)” in his medical text Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, he goes on to somewhat contradictorily suggest that it is not necessary for the 25- to 60-year-old demographic or for students and sedentary people.40 Once again, breakfast is relegated to a meal for children and the elderly.
By the 17th century, with the likes of diarist Samuel Pepys providing discursive accounts of his breakfasts, eating in the morning had more or less lost its stigma. In the newly settled America, colonists seem to have left old hang-ups behind in the Old World; that, or they were too busy trying to survive to quibble about the moral dilemma of skipping breakfast. By the middle of the 18th century, England and America alike were basking in the glow of breakfast’s budding golden age; matutinal feasts of mutton chops, bacon, eggs, corn cakes, and muffins—even pie—were favorites of American Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and commonplace among the upper classes. Franklin’s only complaint was that his coworkers drank too much beer in the morning.
Breakfast was so adored in the middle of the 18th century that rooms devoted exclusively to the morning meal were built into new homes. Instead of taking a light repast in one’s bedchambers, the breakfast room was a place to enjoy a sip of tea or coffee while languishing over a newspaper and a sweet roll, a place to host guests for casual dining, or where gentlemen could make merry over coffee and spirited political discourse. Breakfast parties afforded young people an opportunity to meet and mingle without a chaperone’s vigilant supervision.
As the breakfast debate began to wind down in Europe, in Arabia, Sufis of Yemen had been busy experimenting with roasting Ethiopian coffee beans.41 Though the story of Ethiopian sheepherder Kaldi claims that coffee had been in use since the 9th century, the transformation of the bitter green seeds into an inky, aromatic brew through roasting was a revelation that would not occur until the late 15th century.42 Coffee as it is known today quickly spread throughout the Middle East and soon it had reached Persia and Turkey. Then the roasting techniques made it back to northern Africa, and eventually spread to India, then Italy, Indonesia, the rest of Europe, and the Americas by the mid-17th century.43 Soon, trendy coffee houses began popping up in Venice, Paris, Oxford, and Boston.
The earliest written records of the Chinese using tea as a beverage date back to the 10th century BCE. Though the Portuguese expansion in the 16th century introduced tea to Europe, new evidence suggests it has been used since the Paleolithic.44 When Charles II of England married Portuguese tea drinker Catherine of Braganza in 1662, such became the frenzy for tea among the fashionable wealthy that the consumption of tea exploded, eventually exceeding that of alcohol, at least among the affluent.45 A few years later, it became available in Massachusetts in the United States and became a favorite of colonists.
Most credit for the invention of so-called English Breakfast tea goes to one Scottish tea master called Drysdale, who purportedly developed the blend of Ceylon, Keemun, and Assam leaves to market as “Breakfast Tea” in the late 1800s. But according to the Journal of Commerce, it had already been invented and named English Breakfast by an English-born apothecary in 1843, in New York.46 Tea went suddenly from being an afternoon affair to an official breakfast beverage. By the 19th century, tea was widely consumed by all social tiers.
Coffee and tea were exotic and chic. As stimulants, they could be prescribed as medicinal by physicians, offering another legitimate excuse to eat early in the day. Unlike the expensive chocolate drunk by the Spanish nobility in the South, for most regular Europeans the introduction of coffee and tea meant alcohol had been replaced as the preferred morning beverage, which granted the Church the moral high ground to finally approve of dining in the morning. Breakfast finally went from a boorish repast of the working proletariat to a meal suitable for members of every level of society.
Eighteenth Century to Today
Between the Early Modern Period (following the Middle Ages) and the mid-1700s, breakfast changed very little in Europe; the meal had changed even less in the infant America. When they did eat it, rich people ate meat and eggs, and poor people ate porridge or gruel, or stale bread and ale. By the end of the 18th century, dinner had already been pushed to 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., eventually pushing supper even later in the evening.47 With the shift of the day’s two meals toward a later time came the need to eat in those hours between waking and lunch—a meal to break the evening’s fast. Physicians and the Church had little negative left to say about it and finally approved of the already firmly established custom. At long last, the modern breakfast made its triumphant debut.
By the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1819, bacon and eggs had already become firmly fixed as a part of the everyday breakfast. Even among most of the English working class, bacon was ubiquitous; in fact, the only time it was not served was on sausage or ham day. In well-to-do English households, most days began with porridge, followed by bacon and eggs cooked in a variety of ways. These could be cooked beforehand and left in a chafing dish until the master and mistress arose to eat. Soon, the Victorian era witnessed the birth of Britain’s greatest (perhaps only) culinary achievement: the Full Breakfast.48
Though the Full English breakfast is central to the British national identity, the meal itself is only a relatively recent construct. As the 18th-century tradition of a full breakfast was dying out in favor of the simpler coffee and rolls, the mythos of the “Full English”—an alternative to the Continental or American breakfasts of the day—began in earnest.
The Victorian era (and the Second Industrial Revolution) in the latter half of the 19th century brought about the rise of the bourgeois middle class. Besides becoming absolutely necessary for the working class headed for the morning shift, breakfast provided additional opportunities for the middle class to brandish newly acquired wealth. Like most meals, breakfasts reflected the increase in leisure time and disposable income not seen in previous eras. The nouveau riche brought a certain amount of sensible, working-class structure into daily society life, allowing the arrangement of mealtimes—including that of breakfast—to become more firmly established. But there was still (new) money to burn, and lavish three-course breakfasts of eggs, fish, cured pork products, hot cereals, fresh fruits, and toast with butter and jam with coffee and tea became a way for the parvenu and established socialites to while away the morning hours.49
These large morning spreads came to closely resemble what we think of today as brunch; the word “brunch” first came into use in the English language at around the same time. British journalist Guy Beringer, in a piece for Hunter’s Weekly in 1895,50 wrote persuasively that “[b]y eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday-night carousers. It would promote human happiness in other ways as well. Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting. It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.”
Although it is technically a meal falling between the times of breakfast and lunch (hence the portmanteau), brunch usually consisted of breakfast foods, and this persists today. Without work to tend to, more time can be spent on elaborate versions of breakfast basics or other time-consuming dishes like Crêpes Suzettes—coincidentally invented the same year as the word “brunch.” And as Beringer mentions, brunch is a meal best served on Sundays, which may be part of the reason why Sunday holidays like Mother’s Day are celebrated with a brunch. Though an Englishman coined the word, brunch continues to take the form of high art in the United States, perhaps in lieu of the laudable Full English of Britain.
Early 19th-century Americans still typically enjoyed only two meals a day: a large breakfast at around 8:00 a.m. and a late-afternoon dinner. The time at which one had one’s breakfast was largely dictated by one’s affluence (or lack thereof): Poor people rose earlier to get straight to their chores and ate an hour or two later, while the wealthier classes slept in and enjoyed a leisurely morning, taking both of their meals later.51 By the end of the 19th century, relatively balanced and sensible breakfast menus appear in cookbooks like Fannie Farmer’s 1896 bestseller The Boston Cooking School Cook Book. Typical breakfasts in Farmer’s book consist of eggs, meat or fish (apparently left over from the previous evening’s supper), a fruit, a hot cereal, a potato (usually fried), and a bread product (often a muffin or biscuit). Each of her eighteen breakfast menus includes coffee.
Even in late-1800s America there were still those stalwart few clamoring on about what to eat for breakfast, or what not to eat, as the case may be. Cookbook author and professor of French cookery (and perhaps the first celebrity chef) Pierre Blot made very specific rules for breakfast: Eat as little as possible; do not have any liquor, no matter what one’s age or gender; if one is going to have it (which one should not), eat only leftover meat (and cold, not warm); avoid warm cakes, muffins, or pastries, which are very bad for the stomach and teeth; drink only coffee, milk, water, or cocoa, but do not by any means drink tea for breakfast.52 This omission of tea is reflected in Boston Cooking School founder Fannie Farmer’s breakfast menus as well, though she makes no explanation for its absence and goes further to declare that the United States is not a tea-drinking country.53
Perhaps due to his propensity for wagging his finger at extravagance, Blot went from being touted by the New York Times as “the eminent gastronomist . . . whose name has become a household word” in 1867 to a social pariah whose death a mere seven years later would not even receive an obituary in the very paper that praised him so. It appeared that the fickle wealthy of New York preferred to leave the matter of cooking to their Irish servants.54
Outside of the big cities, American pioneers and farmers had been enjoying a variety of corn-based breakfasts. This was largely thanks to the thousands of years of diligent genetic modification that indigenous Mesoamericans had performed to increase the size and carbohydrate content of the large graminoid’s fruiting structure—the spikelet, or ear. In a process of selective breeding, Mesoamericans domesticated the Mexican annual teosinte (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis) into maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) by selection of key mutations; up to 12 percent of its genetic material is derived from another subspecies, Zea mays ssp. mexicana, through a natural process called introgressive hybridization.55 Of all New World crops, colonialists most readily accepted corn.
Hulled corn made into hominy was an inexpensive and filling breakfast commonly eaten with milk or maple syrup, or fried in pork drippings. The hulled corn was first treated with alkaline ash in a process called nixtamalization. The nixtamalization process, used by Mesoamericans since approximately 1500–1200 BCE, frees the niacin in the kernel, making it available for absorption by the human body, and preventing deficiency diseases such as pellagra. Pellagra is also characterized by protein deficiency due to the lack of two amino acids in early corn crops: lysine and tryptophan. Nixtamalization somewhat increases the bioavailability of these amino acids, but indigenous people also had long known that by balancing the maize in their diet with meat or other crops such beans, amaranth, and chia, that disease could be averted. What they did not realize was that this is the only way the complete array of amino acids may be acquired by the human body, and the way for normal protein synthesis to occur. Pellagra was virtually unknown among indigenous populations.
In the autobiographical novel Little House in the Big Woods, author Laura Ingalls Wilder goes into great detail describing her mother’s nixtamalization techniques using fresh corn and wood ash from the fireplace. After husking the ears and cutting the kernels (a task performed by Wilder’s father), her mother boiled the cut kernels with the ashes until the corn swelled and their skins slipped off easily. This took what is rather unscientifically described as “a long time.” Then she turned the corn into a pot of cold water and she rubbed the skins off until all of the kernels were hulled, changing the water as it became cloudy.
Mrs. Ingalls may have learned the technique from Iroquoian Huron Indians, who in turn may have learned it from the Navajo tribe Hopi, believed to have been descended from ancient Puebloan cultures, and who continue to use the process today. The word comes from the Aztec language Nahuatl; a compound of nextli “ashes” and tamalli “unformed corn dough” (tamal). The word hominy is similarly derived from indigenous Americans, in this case the Powhatan (Virginia Algonquin) word rockahommie. In the 19th and early 20th century, trail food called “rockahominy” specifically referred to the roasted and coarse-ground nixtamalized corn, closer to today’s hominy grits.
Corn has remained a sacred food of indigenous Americans, present in most aspects of everyday life and in ceremony, dating back to the first European contact. The delicate, tortilla-like Hopi dish piki, or paper-bread, is a ceremonial breakfast eaten by a man and woman on the morning of their wedding day, a practice that dates back to at least the 16th century (when Spaniards arrived), but probably much earlier.56 Though it is not strictly a breakfast food, the act of eating piki on the morning of their wedding day is a critical part of the commitment ceremony for Hopi couples. The piki is made by finely grinding blue maize into a powder on a metate, which is mixed with water into a thin batter. The ashes of the greasewood shrub (Sarcobatus vermiculatis) are added to accentuate the blueness of the piki. The batter is smeared on a hot, flat rock greased with the oil of sunflower, squash, or watermelon seeds and it cooks almost instantaneously. The thin bread is quickly peeled off the rock and rolled tightly into scrolls two inches thick. Piki is said by American journalist Raymond Sokolov to be the “highest expression of Hopi cuisine, and the most intricate symbol of the intertwining of traditional Hopi life with corn.” Ceremonial piki must always be sacred blue, to symbolize the heavens. A woman’s suitability for marriage was judged solely on her piki.57
Untreated corn was also dried and ground into meal for baking and frying a variety of breads: cornbread, corn pone, johnnycakes (or hoecakes), and hush puppies. These indigenous American foods later became more closely associated with the working class in the American South. Corn meals were also used for a variety of porridges with a wide array of colloquial names: samp, Indian pudding, Indian mush, cornmeal mush, hasty pudding, pudding corn, coosh.
Use of hickory coal to smoke meats like ham, bacon, and sausage was also learned from indigenous people; Plains Indians hung meat at the top of their tipis to increase its contact with smoke. Smoking meats not only imparted a unique flavor to the meats, but also preserved them for long-term storage. American breakfast meats got their signature flavor from a combination of salting, smoking, and later, saltpeter. In the 19th century it was discovered that the addition of potassium nitrate to the curing salt maintained the meat’s red color rather than the unappetizing gray of earlier cured meats.58 Consumption of cured meat skyrocketed.
The advent of today’s breakfast cereals was likely a response to the new habits of beginning one’s day with an excess of meats and other rich foods. The so-called Jacksonian-era Clean Living Movement (a term coined in 1990 by social scientist Ruth Engs and a spinoff of the Popular Health Movement) was highly influential in mid-19th-century United States dietetics, introducing a regimen of personal hygiene, exercise, and vegetarianism, as well as elimination of stimulants from one’s diet.59 While it promoted a rational skepticism of the “authority” of established medical expertise, the Popular Health Movement also attempted to abolish all other intellectual elitism.
This may have been tangentially related to early 19th-century dietary reformer Sylvester Graham’s glorification of brown bread—symbol of the common people—as more wholesome than the refined white bread of the college-educated (read: intellectually elite) middle class. (Ironically, by the latter half of the 20th century, the reverse would be true.) Backlash against Industrial-era conveniences like chemical leavening agents preferred by commercial bakers for the production of white bread led to a focus on wholesome, unprocessed foods in the mid-19th century, thought to promote mental and spiritual health as well as a more hygienic physical self. (Incidentally, two major groups of Clean Living proponents, the Mormon and Seventh Day Adventist Churches, emerged from this era.)
The end of the Clean Living Movement in the latter half of the 1800s also saw the creation of the first modern breakfast cereals, changing the American breakfast landscape forever. Contrary to modern marketing themes, it was the quest for health—not convenience—that drove the invention of breakfast cereal. In 1863, granola was invented by Dr. James Caleb Jackson, who called it “Granula” after the texture of the crisped and crumbled nuggets of bran-rich Graham flour.60 Although it provided ample dietary fiber to alleviate painful gastric disorders brought on by an overindulgence in meat, Granula lacked the convenience of today’s breakfast cereals; the large nuggets were very dense and required overnight soaking before eating. Jackson’s views on health and diet influenced the health reform of Ellen White, who would go on to found the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
In 1894, flaked breakfast cereal was accidentally invented by Seventh Day Adventist John Harvey Kellogg. Seventh Day Adventists—known for being vegetarian health fanatics, among other things—founded the Battle Creek Sanitarium (originally opened as the Western Health Reform Institute) in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was the health resort for the social elite, and Corn Flakes would become their panacea.
Flaked cereal was developed entirely by happenstance, when a pot of cooked wheat was left unattended and went stale. With an eye on their bottom line, John Kellogg (the Sanitarium’s superintendent) and his younger brother Will decided to try forcing the paste through rollers, hoping for usable sheets of dough. Instead, it dried into flakes, which were fortunately a big hit among the Sanitarium’s clientele. The Kelloggs went into full-time packaged flaked cereal production using corn and various other grains. They had a patent for the technique two years later. That did not prevent the idea from being copied by others, including one C. W. Post, who noted the production details during an ill-conceived tour of the factory given at the Sanitarium. Post went on to found Post Cereals, Kellogg’s top competitor. John Kellogg later developed a cereal similar to the Granula invented by Jackson thirty years earlier, but the name was changed to granola to avoid legal problems. Will Kellogg added sugar to Corn Flakes against John’s protests in attempt to bolster sales, and then founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which eventually became the Kellogg Company. After the ensuing fraternal feud, John founded the Battle Creek Food Company.
Dietary reform often began with breakfast. With the ascent of the Clean Living Movement, mutton chops gave way to whole grain cereals. The expansion of the railroad in the latter 19th century meant that citrus fruits from Florida and California would become more available and affordable, and the work of microbiologist Ilya Mechnikov influenced Kellogg to explore the healthful effects of yogurt. John Kellogg’s wife, Ella, went on to write numerous cookbooks on the benefits of a vegetarian diet, offering a litany of recipes for Graham gems and gluten porridge. Her breakfast offerings were “pretty and dainty” as well as “suited to the needs of the invalid.”61 The name Kellogg became synonymous with health and hygiene.62
John Harvey Kellogg, between ca. 1910 and 1915. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Following the invention of ready-made cereals, a wide range of developments occurred that would deeply impact the cultural identity of breakfast. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of convenience and modernity in the kitchen, introducing many of the foods that modern Americans still associate with breakfast: Bisquick (dry mix for biscuits and pancakes), Ballard’s Oven Ready Buttermilk Biscuit (the first refrigerated cardboard tube with portioned biscuit dough, known by the brand name Pillsbury in the 1950s), Cream of Wheat instant semolina cereal, Quaker Oats quick-cooking oats, Sanka’s instant decaffeinated coffee, and Lender’s bagels.63 Many of these instant and ready-made convenience foods became more necessary during the egg and meat rationing of World War II.
Cereal box prizes were first introduced to markets by Kellogg’s in 1945 in the form of pin-back buttons inserted into Pep cereal. A year later, injection molding made the production of cheap, plastic toys possible, and cereal companies quickly caught on. The addition of cartoon mascots like the Rice Krispies Elves (introduced in 1930s) firmly implanted cereal companies into the psyches of American children. Breakfast cereals soon began their descent into the nutritional wasteland of modern sugar cereals, matching marketing efforts directed toward the first kids of the Post–World War II baby boom generation.
The 1940s and 1950s experienced another boom, in the American diner craze. Though travelling café wagons and lunch cars had been around since the late 1800s, stationary diners—often little more than prefabricated tin cans resembling mobile homes—hit their stride after WWII, concurrently with the rise in suburban populations. Postwar, diners presented an attractive small business opportunity in urban and suburban areas around the northeastern United States. These were the first dining establishments to emphasize breakfast foods and offer them twenty-four hours a day.
Twenty-four-hour diners were more than a place for lonely hearts to ponder the bottom of their coffee cups, or for late-night revelers to wind down the evening’s imbibing; postwar diners were often sited near factories that operated at all hours, offering graveyard shift workers—a key component of their customer base—a place to enjoy hearty breakfast fare in the morning hours after their shifts had ended.
At home, breakfasts were becoming an afterthought, quickly thrown together to get the kids off to school. With the rise of feminism in the 1960s came an increased demand for foods that would move liberated mothers out of the kitchen. Instant oatmeal, Yoplait’s sweetened, individually packaged yogurt cups, and Carnation’s chocolate-flavored Instant Breakfast entered markets in the 1960s, while new sugar cereals continued to be introduced every year.64 This may have been the market’s predictable response to an increased demand, but was just as likely an advantageous coincidence that allowed American mothers to justify stepping away from the stove. Either way, American women were increasingly liberated from their kitchens and free to pursue the workplace and other endeavors.
Ever the kingpin of breakfast convenience foods, or perhaps sensing a sea change in the American family dynamic and seizing the opportunity, Kellogg’s was the first to bring toaster pastries to the market in 1964, with their Pop-Tart. Post had developed the foil-wrapping technology and invented the packaged toaster pastry called “Country Squares” in 1963, but was foolish enough to announce their product to the press before it was actually ready to bring to market. Kellogg’s, perhaps still bitter about losing the monopoly on cold breakfast cereals, was able to develop its own version in six months, and Pop-Tarts were so popular that Kellogg’s could barely keep up with the demand.65
Country Squares never really took off, while Pop-Tarts continue to be a top seller for Kellogg’s. In the early 1960s, with popular television bringing American audiences shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show’s slack-jawed bumpkin Gomer Pyle, the word “country” was less associated with wholesome, healthy living and more reminiscent of hayseeds with a penchant for pitchforks, banjoes, and “kissin’ cousins”; meanwhile, “square” had been co-opted from the Beatnik vernacular to mean someone who is unhip and old-fashioned. Country Squares never stood a chance.66
Decades later, critics would clamor that what women were gaining in convenience could not mitigate the deterioration of public health that eventually arose from this increased reliance on prepackaged foods high in preservatives. Many authors, including Michael Pollan, have perhaps unintentionally implicated feminism for the decline in home cooking, citing Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which equates cooking with oppression against women. Pollan’s In Defense of Food goes on to explain that this belief was not necessarily shared by French feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, who considered cooking a form of “revelation and creation,” or Julia Child, who detested the word “housewife” and never cottoned to condescending to viewers with such a label. In reality, the convenience of ready-made breakfast foods like cold cereal and frozen waffles were a help to housewives for several decades before they were a help to feminists stepping away from the stove. Even women who actually enjoyed cooking often fed cereal to their children; it is what their children wanted to eat (because of high sugar content and effective advertising during cartoons), but also because providing a cabinet of cereal for a child to pour herself fostered the child’s burgeoning independence—a parenting theme promoted by eminent mid-century pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock.67
Convenience foods may have been a boon to busy, well-meaning housewives of the 1960s, but across America, members of the counterculture were becoming disenchanted with their separation from the natural world and the food chain. They began to identify with the back-to-the-land movement that had been quietly raging since the Great Depression. Responding to a new market, cereal makers gave granola a facelift; dried fruits and seeds were added to the toasted, sweetened grains, and granola became an overnight sensation with the ecology movement’s new generation of health food consumers. Colloquially, the word “granola” is still largely evocative of hippies. The original Swiss health food, müesli, also grew in popularity as a result of this renewed interest in wholesome diets.
In the American South, a sort of anti-health-food movement had been holding strong. Comfort foods like biscuits with sorghum or cane syrup, fried fish, and grits had been part of the African American culinary identity for generations, yet the term “soul food” was not first printed until 1960, when the word “soul” was becoming a pop-culture synonym for “black.”68 For people who toiled in the fields from dawn until dusk, a calorie-dense breakfast was requisite, but even now that farm labor has dramatically decreased among African American Southerners, soul foods—including breakfasts—persist. This is due in part to strong cultural heritage that Americans of color associate with their traditional foods; soul food is part of their identity, to be shared with members of an extended family or church community.
Soul breakfasts also bore a great similarity to brunch—a meal over which many Southerners (New Orleanians, in particular) have claimed ownership. For French Quarter merchants who began their workday well before dawn, breakfast was eaten relatively late; Creole breakfast items like Eggs Sardou served alongside soul food dishes such as shrimp and grits are still central to the regional ethnicity. Like most brunches, these large breakfasts are normally reserved for Sundays and holidays when a more leisurely cooking and dining pace may be afforded.
Once necessary for sustaining long, grueling hours in indentured labor, traditionally prepared soul foods tend to be high in calories, fat, cholesterol, starch, and sodium. Soul food has been linked to high rates of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke in modern African Americans, but it may actually be the use of recycled cooking oil, rather than fried food itself, that is to blame. One study found that the degradation of reused cooking oil into polymers and polar compounds (which reabsorbed into the food) were responsible for increased rates of hypertension.69
By the early 1970s, producers of mainstream breakfast foods were eager to capitalize on the popularity of the new “Black is Beautiful” culture and used R&B musicians and black athletes to promote their products. Musical sensations the Jackson 5 starred in television commercials for cereal brands like Post Alpha Bits, while spoofing Quaker Oats’ Life cereal on their 1972 television variety program The Jackson 5 Show. The exhibition basketball team The Harlem Globetrotters were used in a promotion for General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs.
In the 1970s, breakfasts, like all meals, were informed by the economic challenges faced by many households. The School Breakfast Program (SBP) introduced federally subsidized breakfasts under the jurisdiction of the Child Nutrition Act of 1966; amendments to the Act in 1975 made the SBP permanent. Though participation rates were initially slow, the years between 1970 and 1980 experienced rapid growth in participation in the SBP, attributed by the USDA to an increase in the number of households in which the mother worked outside of the home—a phenomenon driven in part by the economy, and in part by women’s increased desire for professional autonomy.70
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (abbreviated as WIC), enacted in 1972, is another federal spinoff of the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, created to address healthcare and nutritional needs of low-income pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and infants and children under the age of five. These programs helped children too young to benefit from the SBP, while also providing guidance to families on how to prepare balanced meals. WIC provides women with lists of foods that qualify under their program, which are provided free with vouchers. Since its inception, WIC has not allowed program participants to use vouchers to purchase Kellogg’s Raisin Bran because it exceeds WIC’s limit of 45 percent sugar.71 This was a decision that understandably offended Kellogg’s—they lobbied against WIC’s sugar limits for more than twenty years on the grounds that raisins are fruit. Though raisins are naturally high in fructose, WIC has not budged on the issue; Kellogg’s has since ceded, and began adding high-fructose corn syrup to Raisin Bran in 2010.
In response to the worldwide food crisis (in Ethiopia, India, and China, notably), vegetarianism—as an environmental and social responsibility, and a solution to worldwide famine—experienced a resurgence in popularity with Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 Diet for a Small Planet. Soon, whole grain pancakes and fruits replaced bacon and eggs on the breakfast tables of American families.
A focus on grain-based foods was emphasized by Adventist vegetarians of the late 19th century and modern adherents in the 1920s, but cereals were not the end-all and be-all of a vegetarian’s breakfast. Back-to-the-land types in the 1970s brought an appreciation for the wonders and wide-ranging appeal of the soybean. Soy-based meat analogs were a vegetarian’s dream come true, and patents for the first soy-based “bacon” were filed in 1974.72 Even nonvegetarians were eager to eat lighter, though; a patent specifically for “process for preparing fabricated bacon”—the first turkey bacon—came in 1977.
The 1970s also witnessed the birth of the fast food drive-through lane and breakfast sandwiches like McDonald’s Egg McMuffin. Eggs and sausage, ham, or bacon on an English muffin became a time-saving way to grab breakfast on one’s way to work. Inhabitants of the British Isles typically opted for a breakfast roll instead of the Full Breakfast. The breakfast is not rolled in the style of an American breakfast burrito; rather, the ingredients of a Full English—sausages, bacon, white or black pudding, butter, mushrooms, tomatoes, and tomato sauce or brown sauce (everything but the beans) is served on a white roll. Though the take-out breakfast roll had been inspired by American fast food, the idea was actually a British one; bacon or sausages sold in a bread roll (a “bap,” as they were known) dates back to the mid-19th century.73
In the 1980s, frozen breakfast foods grew more than any other frozen foods, due to the rapid price drop in microwave ovens. As cereal companies like Quaker Oats and Kellogg’s had already begun cashing in on the whole grains trend in the 1970s, all that was left was to package the cereals in microwavable paper or plastic cups. Muffins were on the rise, both in popularity, and in size. Muffins were “what the world is looking for,” said Richard J. Sharoff, the 1987 president of California-based bakery chain Vie de France. “They’re a portable, good-tasting breakfast product with healthy connotations. You don’t have to put them in the oven. There’s no mess, and you can eat them on the run. They are the quintessential food of the 1980s.”74
The marriage of European and California-style cuisine made other impacts on the breakfast table as well. In the late 1980s, quiches were popular at any meal, as was anything with avocados, goat cheese, and sun-dried tomatoes. These west-coast ingredients trickled into crepes and omelets, and increasingly, tofu scrambles, particularly as the decade moved into the health-crazed 1990s. By the end of the 20th century, bacon and eggs were back on the plate, thanks to zealous misinterpretation of the studies of Dr. Robert Atkins, which led approximately 10 percent of Americans to abandon carbohydrates. Fortunately for bakers, the Atkins Nutritionals Company filed for bankruptcy in 2005.