Where Did the English Country House Breakfast Come From?
The country house breakfast was at its height from the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War, although its roots went back before that.
In a house the saize of a small palace, a buffet was laid out: game (in season), fish, fresh breads, made dishes such as devilled kidneys, tea, and coffee. potted shrimp and crab, fish pies, pickled meat dishes from brisket and goose to ox palate and thrush, apple and strawberry fools, a variety of macaroni dishes, and lots of Indian-style dishe, such as pilau, kedgeree and curried lobster.
Only perhaps one English person in a hundred ever tasted such a breakfast, even though a simpler version did filter down the social scale.
(Note that the country house breakfast had little to do with what is now sold as an English breakfast: bacon, sausage, fried egg, baked beans, and toast. This has emerged in its present form since I left England in the 1970s).
In The English Breakfast, Kaori O’Connor, an anthropologist at University College London, offers a “biography of the meal, a culinary detective story and a cookbook all rolled into one” in her introduction, just over fifty pages in all. (Most of the book, which is priced so ridiculously I am not even going to give you the bad news, consists of reprints of a couple of small nineteenth-century pieces on the English breakfast, followed by (1) Georgiana Hill’s The Breakfast Book(1865); (2) Miss M.L. Allen’s Breakfast Dishes for Every Morning of Three Months (1884); and (3) Colonel Kenney Herbert‘s Fifty Breakfasts (1894)).
The breakfast cookbooks, all written for the leisured classes or those who aspired to be part of the leisured classes, are a window into a vanished world. They are mainly for men (women could stay in bed). For the British well-to-do male, this buffet-style meal was fortification enough for a day of country pursuits, hunting, shooting, or fishing.
Kaori O’Connor asks: why did the country house breakfast become so important a part of English culture? For most of their history, the English upper class, like other European aristocrats, did not eat breakfast. The first meal of the day (dinner) was taken at midday, the second in the evening.
Her answer is that the country house breakfast asserted English, Anglo-Saxon identity in the face of expanding French high cuisine. It gained popularity at a time when Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe, the story of an Anglo-Saxon family in an England ruled by Normans (French). One of its characters was Robin Hood, established him and his band of “merrry men” as an authentic English hero. It was also the when Alfred the Great was reinvented as one of England’s foundering monarchs.
The country house breakfast consisted of “honest” plain food not fancy sauced food, understood as French. The ingredients from the walled garden, home farm, and estate in Scotland were reminiscent of those advocated by Cato and other republicans in Ancient Rome who prided themselves on home-grown food from the estate. Move the former midday meal back a bit and you have the dishes that were served.
A breakfast of this size at 9 in the morning allowed men to spend the rest of the day on horseback following hounds, shooting game, or fishing for trout or salmon (the famous trio, hunting, shooting, fishing, pastimes of the country gentleman). All they needed was a picnic. Dinner became an evening meal.
As a result (and here I extending Kaori’s analysis) the English aristocracy and gentry had a Janus-faced cuisine.
In the morning, particularly in the country, they ate English food, asserting their identity with the nation.
At the evening dinner, they (like the upper classes across Europe) they ate French food, prepared by a French or a French-trained cook, asserting their role as part of a cosmopolitan world and as leaders of a world empire.
Best of both worlds.
Oh, I get it! So that’s where the Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast came from. We got it from the English :)
I’m not so sure of the invention of the breakfast in the mid-19th century, on any social level. I don’t have an issue with narrow definitions, but I do with extrapolating from this point.
I would be very unhappy with the premise that there was a specific type of breakfast specific to the uber-wealthy in the mid-19th century that was the main influence on the modern British cooked breakfast. There are many sources.
Even the upperclass breakfasts is plentiful in the 18th century and seem common place in the early 19th. This from 1824 is quite typical.
“A philosophic mind devoted to this subject, would, I think, adopt a theory not widely differing from the following, which, however, I venture to lay down with much diffidence. I say, then, that a man’s breakfast should be adapted to his pursuits — it should come home to his business as well as to his bosom. The man who intends to study all the morning, should take a cup
or two of coffee, a little well executed toast, and the wing of a partridge or grouse, when in season ; at other times of the year, a small slice of cold chicken, with plenty of pepper and mustard ; this light diet prepares him for the elastic exercise of his intellectual powers. On the other hand, if you are going to the fox-chase, or to the moors, or to any sphere of violent bodily exertion
whatever, in this case your breakfast will be good and praiseworthy, exactly in proportion as it approaches to the character of a good and praiseworthy dinner. Hot potatoes, chops, beefsteaks, a pint of Burgundy, a quart of good old beer — these are the sort of materials a sportsman’s dejeune should consist of. Fried fish is an excellent thing also — particularly the herring. If
you have been tipsy overnight, and feel squeamish, settle your heart with half a glass of old cogniac, ere you assume the knife and fork : but on no account
indulge the whimsies of your stomach, so as to go without a real breakfast. — ”
From the 18th century:
“Not long after the dram, may be expected the breakfast; a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped, he would breakfast in Scotland. “
I doubt if the genre of British Murder Mystery would exist without the English Breakfast. Peter Wimsey would simply be too weak to proceed as usual and his characterization would not be nearly as strong. And without Wimsey what would one do?
Thanks for both comments. Karen, I need to go back and read Dorothy Sayers. She went to the same school I did (a generation earlier I hasten to add) and so I wonder where she got her English breakfast and the rest of the Wimsey mystique. Certainly not at school!! Perhaps her family.
And Adam see following post.
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