Over Easy

Between 1970 and 2010 I seldom ate breakfast. I had no hard-and-fast rule about it. Breakfast sometimes happened: no one ever was shocked to hear I had pancakes earlier in the day, but on a typical day I didn’t. On any given morning I just usually preferred to spend that time snoozing a bit longer and saving up the calories for lunch, the customary foods for which I liked better than the customary foods for breakfast anyway. I never believed the “most important meal of the day” adage, and indeed recent studies have cast serious doubt on it. Breakfasting in those years was more of an occasional indulgence. My meal habits began to change along with my lifestyle in general about a decade ago for a variety of unplanned reasons that I won’t list here. Nowadays breakfast gets the nod three times a week or so. It’s still not quite a majority of days, but it’s teetering on the edge.

Many authors who write in English on the history of cuisine repeat that breakfast was not really a thing until Tudor times. They allow that farmers and simple laborers ate before work, but say the upper crust generally did not. This is misleading. For one thing, farmers and simple laborers were by far the majority of the population in England as in the rest of the world. For another, the upper crust ate whenever they wanted: many of them in the morning. It is true that the word “breakfast” appears in English in Tudor times, but the idea was nothing new. The rise of wage employment in this era did tend to regularize working hours and, accordingly, mealtimes, but munching in morning, midday, and evening predated England. Ancient Romans, for example, followed the familiar three meal pattern (sometimes adding an afternoon snack); jentaculum, the morning meal, most definitely translates as “breakfast.” (Replace the “j” with an “i” if you prefer classical spelling.) The first century poet Martial mentions bakers selling boys pastries for breakfast (jam vendit pueris jentaculus pistor), so we know Romans patronized the equivalent of donut shops in the morning. Other sources mention eggs, milk, mulsum (wine and honey), and a pottage of grains, vegetables, and meats all cooked together in a stew pot. Naturally, wealthier folk had more choices, and ate much the same as they did at other meals.

Yesterday morning (I am writing soon after midnight, so I mean some 15 hours ago), I stopped by one of my usual a.m. haunts and perused the specials on the board. The country fried steak is great at this spot, but it is a hefty meal to put it mildly; it’s best reserved for days when hungrier than I was. The chili jalapeno omelet called to me, too, but in the end I opted for something else: eggs over easy on prime rib hash with hash browns on the side. While this was a satisfying selection, it did raise the question of why some foods are customary for breakfast and not others – hamburgers for instance. Ultimately, the answer is circular: items are offered on the breakfast menu because we expect them to be there. There is a history to those expectations, but much of it is not as deep as one might imagine.

The deepest involves the cereal porridges: oatmeal, barley, wheat, maize (in the New World), and rice (especially in Asia). They are prehistoric, having become available with the advent of Neolithic farming. (The same meal likely would be on the table later, too.) Stews and pottages (not unlike Roman pottage) also appeared early and were common world-wide up through the 18^th century. Wealthier folk had access to more varied fare. Breakfast was very much a thing in colonial America and the early Republic. One aspect of breakfast on this continent right up through the middle of the 19^th century that seems odd to us today is the ubiquity of alcohol. Ale, wine, or cider were a normal part of the meal. John Adams accompanied breakfast every day with a tankard of hard cider, after which he commonly swam in the Potomac; the only thing odd about that routine in his day was the swim. As wealth increased and diets improved through the 19^th century, breakfast became bigger and its fare more distinct from other meals. Victorian fare included ham, eggs, puddings, venison pies, fritters and more. The temperance movement and cleaner sources of water reduced alcohol consumption in the a.m.

In response to the Victorian trend to heavy breakfasts, Kellogg, Graham, and Post developed their light crispy (vegetarian) breakfasts as health food at the turn of the century. The prudish Mr. Graham specifically entertained the hope that his crackers also would reduce sex drive, mention of which aspiration wisely was left out of the marketing campaign. (They don’t.) Americans took to cornflakes and other lighter breakfasts. The invention of the electric waffle iron in 1911 further enhanced grain-based breakfasts. This changed again in the 1920s thanks to Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and author of the how-to (and why-to) book Propaganda (1928). Faced with a surplus of bacon, the Beech-Nut Packing Company hired Bernays, who found 5000 doctors to say that the high-protein farmer’s diet was right all along. His advertising campaign cited this study (“doctors say…”). Bacon and sausage sales took off along with eggs that the meats so tastily accompany. By the end of the 1920s breakfast menus were pretty much what they still are today. (Bernays also marketed cigarettes to women in the ‘20s by associating cigarettes with suffragists, but that is another story.)

All that is making me hungry again. I’ll probably go out for breakfast at least once more this week. Yet, today (meaning in about 12 hours) I think I’ll skip it and go out for lunch instead.

Ray Davies – Is There Life after Breakfast?