A GOOD BREAKFAST, THEN AND NOW

Press, Volume C, Issue 29506, 6 May 1961, Page 8

A GOOD BREAKFAST, THEN AND NOW

Early-morning Appetites Are Changing

[From DAVID GUNSTON, in Denmead, Hampshire] JS a good breakfast becoming a thing of the past? Recent investigations into eating habits suggest that it is. It has been found that, on an average, only four persons out of every 10 sit down to a considerable first meal of the day. The number goes up to about seven in 10 on Saturdays and Sundays, which suggests that a time factor is involved as well as changing appetites. : But as Shakespeare said, “And then to breakfast, With what appetite you, have”; and there is no doubt that our early-morning appetites are changing, and that fewer people every year have much of an appetite first thing in the morning.

In fact, the day of what Izaak Walton called “a good, honest, wholesome, hungry breakfast,” a slap-up feast of perhaps five or six courses, with plenty of meats and fish, puddings and pies, has long been over. But the interesting thing is that the traditional twentieth-century substitute. the cereals, bacon-and-egg or'fish, coffee, toast and marmalade has been firmly undermined by the "light breakfast” dictated by slimming advisers and often enough demanded by the early-morning rush to work, the cigarette on rising, and the sheer lack of appetite. So much so, in fact, that many folk now breakfast on only the last three items of that list, and often enough only on the coffee (or tea). "Hope is a good breakfast." said Francis Bacon 350 years ago. But our ancestors of his day and later rose in the morning filled not only with hope, but with the certainty of a rich tuck-in before the serious business of the day began. The Englishman’s traditional love for a good breakfast, although no longer true, is hard to live down, and was established over many centuries of practice. "Good roast beef and beer” were two favourite standbys. but providing one was not too dyspeptic from the junketings of the night before—in the seventeenth century, at least—this is the sort of thing one would expect to see on the breakfasttable: roast chicken, roast ducks, -roast pigeons, potted salmon, ham in aspic, jellied tongue, potted shrimps, winejelly tarts, raised meat pie. lobster salad, boiled eggs, caramel custard, sponge cakes, muffins, hot rolls, tea and ale. Social Occasion In those days, among the upper-crust, such feasts were not wasted in solitude, but became the occasion even for social entertaining. Joseph Addison, the essayist, regularly entertained the famous wits and writers of his day to such a breakfast, while many a duchess or society hostess vied with her rivals for the honour of supplying visiting celebrities and even royalty with a rich and rare first meal of the day. In the country, the fare was less elegant but equally substantial. “Plum pudding” frequently accompanied the meats, with perhaps a pickled herring or two, followed by bread, cheese and ale. Izaak Walton, who defined the idfcal

breakfast so well, in fact contented himself with “powdered beef and a radish or two.” but that was on the river-bank at 5 a.m. waiting for the fish to bite, and in any case, the quantities of meat eaten in those days were enormous compared with today. Breakfast time has varied enormously, down the centuries. Four hundred or 500 years ago it was very early indeed for the workers in field or workshop, and so had to be a pretty substantial repast as the next meal might not be taken until the evening. In the eighteenthcentury France of. Louis XV. the Chefs of the aristocracy began preparations for breakfast at 3 a.m. 'and served it in their lords’ and ladies’ bedrooms about 5 a.m. Changing Hours For Meals Then the breakfast hour grew gradually later. The mid-eighteenth century lady of fashion in England started the day at 9 a.m. with a drink of hot chocolate in bed; but her real breakfast did not begin until about 11 am. or so. Through the years the fashionable breakfast grew earlier, hour by hour, but it was not really until the hard-working nineteenth century that breakfast becam,e generally a much earlier meal,.- usually served between 7.30 and 9 a.m. As more people did more work, the hours of meals became wider apart, which meant, a later evening-meal and a still very substantial breakfast to “bridge the gap.” Everyone with leisure took ample time ‘over breakfast. An hour was considered about the minitfium —and. again, the fare varied. If the novelist George Borrow could gloat delightedly over a repast of hare, trout, shrimps, beefsteak and what he called ’“capital tea,” the breakfast of this kind was not really typical of the last century. Rigid Victorianism took over breakfast. The maids rose at 5.30 a.m. to put the house in order, the family rose before 7 a,m. and breakfasted in a dull, regular fashion at 8 o'clock with fish, bacon, boiled eggs, cold meat, muffins.’ toast, marmalade and tea, prefaced oh completed with family prayers (and sometimes even hymns). That, of course, was the rule in the better-off homes. But the real decline of breakfast also set in during the nineteenth century, thanks to the industrial revolution and

the grinding poverty of masses of ordinary people. The only breakfast many a clerk, sempstress or factoryhand of Queen Victoria’s day could afford was a halfpenny roll or bun, with a cup of coffee or cocoa. Yet such frugal breakfasts were generally pitied and looked down upon, not widely admired and copied as now. If one rose in prosperity, so one had a fatter breakfast. Oddly enough, the present trend in Britain of ever smaller breakfasts seems to apply only at home. In hotels, and on holiday, when time and appetite are alike more abundant, most Britons want a “good honest, wholesome, hungry breakfast” and feel cheated if they don’t receive it. This probably explains the continuing scorn with which most folk here regard the Continental meal of rolls and coffee. Even so, the modern breakfast is always likely to be but a pale shadow of its former greatness, a sketch rather than a vast work of art.