MORNING MEALS IN HISTORY

Breakfast 

Historically, the type and extent of food service that began the day revealed the availability of foods for a quick, filling break to the night’s fast and the leisure to enjoy it. Persians began the day with a power drink, molasses stirred into clabbered milk, but no formal meal. Arabs paired yogurt with dates or olives; Moroccans melded honey with grilled wheat to make zemata, a sweet porridge washed down with mint tea. For Republican Rome, as far north as the Italian Alps, daily meals began with a light ientaculum (breakfast) of bread, cheese, dried fruit, and olives. Soldiers on the march relied on pulmentus, a porridge roughly stirred together from ground grains. Country folk favored chicken, goose, or quail eggs, which cooks collected fresh each morning.

The Middle Ages introduced more variety in morning breaks with perfunctory barley beer and oatcakes, but still no formal table service. Ironically, in Asia and Europe, the medieval working and farming classes departed for manual labor in the mornings on empty stomachs. A Chinese plowman depended on a midmorning repast of a crust of bread wrapped around an onion bulb or garlic clove.

In contrast to peasants, the first meal of the day for aristocrats fortified them for a relaxed lifestyle. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta, an Islamic Moroccan traveler, performed no manual labor while visiting foreign dignitaries and advising them on government and ethics. Nonetheless, he relished a breakfast of mash (peas) and enjoyed chapatis (thin slabs of bread) fried in ghee with meat kebabs, minced meat with nuts and onions, and damson plums.

Morning Meals in History

By the Renaissance, the study of diet and stamina introduced changes in attitude toward the necessity of a morning meal. Oxford-trained physician Andrew Boorde wrote in 1542 in his Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge that day laborers required three full meals to accommodate the demands of toil. Boorde proposed a corollary, that the privileged class risked health and longevity by overeating. “Brevite and shortnes of lyfe doth folowe,” he warned. Within the century, the morning menu in northwestern Europe began including boiled and poached eggs and bread with salt herring or curd cheese.

For African slaves in the Western Hemisphere, not much changed from medieval times to the seventeenth century. In the American colonies and the sugar islands of the West Indies, field hands cooked their own breakfast from leftover sweet potatoes or corn they grew in small kitchen gardens.

In contrast, a textured still life of a Spanish chocolate service painted by Antonio de Pereda y Salgado in 1652 establishes the atmosphere and mood of the pampered aristocrat. Closely arranged on a maroon cloth, a plate of pastries and cheeses alongside a lidded chocolate pot, a carved molinillo (swizzle stick), and pewter plate with cup, pitcher, and condiment jar connote a pleasant breakfast involving dipping pastries into the hot liquid.

The immigration patterns to North America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exhibited the customs of varied motherlands transferred to the frontier in such breakfast fare as German kuchen and Jewish latkes (potato pancakes). In the early 1700s, reports of Swedish-American cuisine noted that breakfast consisted of pop robbin pudding, an egg batter boiled in milk. In Quebec, light crepes and heavier French toast vied for popularity. During winter 1777–1778, the Pennsylvania Dutch schnitz pie, made with dried apples, solaced the hungry Continental Army for breakfast at Valley Forge.

Peacetime brought together the media and the morning meal. In 1784, aphorist François de la Rochefoucauld commented on the connection between newspapers and breakfast. The perusal of an early-morning gazette accompanied the sipping of chocolate or coffee but impeded table talk. Unlike the dinners and banquets for which Georgian England and Regency France gained fame, breakfast was come-as-you-are casual. Diners could impale bread on toasting forks and hold them at the hearth to heat them enough to melt butter and absorb marmalade. At the Tuileries in Paris in 1799, even the Empress Joséphine enjoyed her morning meal as a social occasion by inviting female friends and their children for a pleasant meal devoid of imperial pomp.

The American Civil War era degraded the soldier’s morning intake to fats and carbohydrates. For Johnny Reb, Confederate provisioners reduced breakfast to coush, a corn mush heated in a greased skillet. While families in the North consumed apple pie with morning coffee, Union soldiers in the field soaked hardtack in water or coffee and fried the squares in leftover meat grease. After wartime exigencies, in Trenton, New Jersey, John Taylor developed pork roll, a sausagelike pork product, in the late 1800s as a popular breakfast and sandwich meat throughout the Garden State.

On the western frontier, pragmatic housewives varied their corn-based meals with New England standards, johnnycake or corn pudding, a cooking style that emulated Amerindian cuisine. The term hasty pudding indicates the hurried stirring of molasses or maple syrup into corn mush for a quick morning repast, rounded out with cups of cider. Fireplace or campfire preparation for families on the move favored ashcakes wrapped in cabbage leaves and roasted in embers or hoecakes heated on a flat metal blade. Corn dodgers suited the horseman, including sheriffs’ posses and salesmen, who stowed the compact edibles in sacks suspended from the saddle horn. For cowboys and wranglers, a delayed breakfast followed the initial ranch or stagecoach chores with a substantial spread, which featured hashed meat with fried eggs and potatoes sautéed with onion and chilies.

The English Way

Emulating Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the English during the Victorian era expressed the middle-class preference for family togetherness with a breakfast sideboard spread of grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, kippers and sausage or chops, meat pasties, Brie or Roquefort cheese, and muffins and toast with jam and butter. Tea took precedence over beer, which the gentry considered too coarse for the morning table. Establishing a precedent at Buckingham Palace on February 10, 1840, French club chef Alexis Soyer catered a breakfast for 2,000 following Queen Victoria’s coronation. Kitchen staff kept plover egg entrées and rashers of bacon warm in chafing dishes along with artichokes, asparagus, and sturgeon.

For the gentry and Americans emulating the British aristocracy, a breakfast around nine or ten in the morning preceded an amble on the grounds or in urban neighborhoods, where strollers worked up an appetite for a more substantial lunch of multiple dishes. Late risers made do with a hot drink, usually chocolate, coffee, or tea.

Following the flow of power, British morning menus permeated colonies around the world. The English morning food habits gave rise to elevenses, a midmorning snack, and to the bed-and-breakfast, a residential inn that provided travelers with a place to sleep and food before they set off for sightseeing or journeys. On Barbados, islanders customized colonial specialties with a native blend of broiled flying fish with a squeeze of lime juice. Bermudans clung to the British Isles with their imported Irish butter and scones. For the Welsh who could ill afford expensive breakfast foods, donkey tea, a stirring of burnt toast crumbs in boiling water, produced a warming drink with little else to recommend it.

As a result of the colonial heritage of Antigua, islanders began the day with a substantial breakfast. According to the semiautobiographical writings of Jamaica Kincaid, schoolchildren ate arrowroot or corn porridge and eggs along with buttered bread, cheese, and grapefruit. On holidays and Sunday mornings, cocoa accompanied a breakfast of antroba (eggplant), boiled eggs, bread, salt fish, and souse, a pickled loaf made from the head and feet of pigs. Kincaid denounced the colonizer’s insidious culture for insisting on English dishes rather than cheap, accessible island fruit, tree-ripened juices, and fresh seafood.

The Industrial Era

Factory-made breakfast foods ended the drudgery of early-morning preparation by replacing hot cereal with cold. In 1877, William Heston and Henry D. Seymour’s Quaker Mill Company of Ravenna, Ohio, made cooked oats a staple of the American breakfast menu. Two Michigan brothers, John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg, introduced Americans to a wholesome, high-fiber breakfast food that required no cooking. In 1894, they manufactured ready-to-eat cereal flakes by baking thin layers of wheat paste. In 1906, the boom in breakfast cereals brought fame to the town of Battle Creek, from which the Kellogg brothers shipped 1,000 cases of bran, corn, and wheat flakes a day.

Charles William Post contributed Post Toasties, the beginning of a convenience food empire. In 1941, General Mills’s introduction of Cheerios turned the staid oat cereal into a crisp doughnut, a shape that the Pennsylvania Dutch invented. Television ads of the early 1950s connected dry cereals with cartoon fun. Children identified breakfast cereals with Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger or Trix Rabbit or Post’s Sugar Bear. Worried mothers topped cereal confections with sliced bananas and berries, a concession to empty calories.

A&P, the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, prefaced an era of merchandise produced by company bakeries, factories, and meat packers, the beginnings of one-stop shopping. The company showcased its more successful product, Eight O’Clock Coffee, a light roast that became America’s oldest name brand in 1859. The chain grocery added more house logos to its array, including Ann Page breakfast pastries.

Today, breakfast menus worldwide vary in detail but often focus on a single bread, fried cake, or cereal eaten with a hot drink of chocolate, tea, or coffee or with cold milk or yogurt. Grain gruel goes by many names, for example, Balinese porridge with coconut milk, Bangladeshi dal, Cambodian babaw (rice congee), Costa Rican rice with black beans and sour cream, English frumenty (spiced wheat in milk), Ghanian porridge, Italian polenta, Malaysian wheat noodles, Nigerian corn ogi, Russian kasha (oatmeal), and Vietnamese pho (rice noodles). In China, a thin rice congee and baozi (steamed buns) accompany fillings of chopped pork and green vegetable or sweetened bean paste. For commuters on bicycles, a quick out-of-hand breakfast of a boiled poultry egg or fried pastries from a sidewalk vendor suffice until there is time in midmorning for green tea.

Breakfast on Christian holidays bears ritual significance. On the fourth Sunday in Lent, English housewives around Bristol make mothering buns, an iced yeast bun topped with decorative candies and served with a hot beverage as a gesture of respect to mothers, the fount of renewal. In London on Good Friday, pastry cooks, such as the bakers of Old Chelsea Bun House in Jews’ Row, advertise hot cross buns, a breakfast once endowed with curative powers. At Easter, the Polish baker aims for a delicate crumb in baba, a cake eaten after the sunrise Resurrection Service, when diners end the Lenten fast. Among Swedes, the kitchen work of children precedes a festal breakfast for adults served on December 13, St. Lucia Day, which preserves the virgin’s martyrdom in 304 C.E. The oldest girl commands the kitchen and prepares a tray of coffee and Lussekatter, a furled sweet St. Lucia bun pocked with raisins, symbols of richness and innocence.

Americans select from wide choices of foods, from fried eggs and ham to pancakes and grits, a small-grained cereal the consistency of Tunisian couscous. Amish kitchen crews dole out ingredients in pinches and dabs rather than standard measures for such traditional foods as corn pie and sausage gravy, a breakfast staple thickened with spelt flour. The Creole influence in New Orleans infuses a sugary diet with more sweets at breakfast, including beignets sprinkled with powdered sugar and calas, fried rice cakes sold by black women on the streets. In South America, manioc becomes a common breakfast choice in the dough of carimañolas (filled fritters) served at breakfast buffets in Cartagena, Colombia.

By the 1970s, fast-food psychology among students, office workers, and drivers eroded the notion of the home breakfast table. The retailing of McDonald’s Egg McMuffin and Burger King’s Croisan’wich and French Toast Sticks with hot coffee created its own mystique enhanced by the electronic media. Schoolchildren made toaster meals from Pop-Tarts and frozen waffles. In 1975, the federal National School Lunch Program funded school breakfasts consisting of fresh fruit and toast or dry cereal with milk. The program subsidized free or reduced priced morning meals to improve nutrition for the poor, especially parturient teens, and to establish a model of wise choices in breakfast menus for building strength and preventing tooth caries. Performance studies confirmed that a substantial amount of the day’s nutrients eaten at breakfast improves pupil concentration and data retention.

In 1979, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study embarrassed cereal makers with a chart of popular brands and the proportion of sugar. Leading the sweets marketers, Kellogg laced Sugar Smacks with 56 percent sugar, as contrasted to Quaker puffed rice, which contained 0.1 percent sucrose. The appeal to children was obvious in merry product names—Alpha Bits, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, and Sugar Crisp, all more than one-third sugar. Although cereals bore the brunt of criticism, fruit-flavored drinks came in second in misleading the public about nutritional content.

A health backlash popularized breakfast cereals enriched with niacin, riboflavin, and thiamine and orange juice enhanced with vitamins C and D. In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration recommended the addition of iron to breakfast cereals and baby foods. Invalids bolstered their intake with Carnation Instant Breakfast and Ensure and with power bars, a packable snack for eating with midmorning coffee. Heartier breakfasts anchored eating to nutrition with fruit smoothies served with granola or muesli, a European favorite composed of dried apricots and raisins, oats, and walnuts.

Families indulged in special-occasion brunches, a sideboard buffet served in late morning by the leisure class, who enjoyed broiled grapefruit halves with a cherry on top or challah toast, while clutching tumblers of Bloody Mary stirred with celery stalks. Northern menus featured lox with bagels and cream cheese; Southern fare tended toward cheese or shrimp grits and pitchers of mimosas. Western breakfast showcased Hispanic influence in burritos and huevos rancheros.

By Mary Ellen Snodgrass in "World Food - An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Social Influence from Hunter-gatherers to the Age of Globalization", Sharp Reference, USA, 2013, excerpts pp.119-123. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa