The English breakfast is an iconic dish in British culinary culture, embodying a centuries-old breakfast tradition that has been passionately sustained and adapted throughout its history by successive generations of British society. The idea of the English breakfast is a historically interesting one, it is an idea that has somehow managed to survive through the extremely long-term cultural changes our country has undergone over the centuries. The idea of the English breakfast, the gradual shift in the traditional ingredients over the years, and the history behind the tradition are infinitely more interesting than a plate of breakfast foods ever could be unless you are hungry for one as you read this. If that is the case, please make sure that you have a full English breakfast in front of you before we proceed.
We believe that the concept of a uniquely "English breakfast" originated shortly after the Norman Invasion of Anglo-Saxon Britain and evolved from traditional Anglo-Saxon culinary traditions. The idea seems to have been provoked by Norman cultural encroachment into the everyday lives of the people living on our beautiful island at the time. But those people weren’t in any way English, and depending on who you talk to they weren’t Anglo-Saxon either. I am massively oversimplifying a profoundly complex cultural and historical saga in an attempt to condense the subject into this article.
Before 1066 breakfast was called "morgenmete" (morning meat), and it's worth noting that the population was comprised of various Germanic tribes—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who had gradually coalesced into an Anglo-Saxon society before the Norman invasion. With that invasion, and their subsequent defeat, came the Norman French elites who spoke a different language, who had completely different culinary traditions, and who began to change the words for the very foods they ate. All of which combined would have, understandably, annoyed the locals at the time.
The Anglo-Saxon elites seemed to have reacted to this cultural shift by working to preserve their culinary traditions and protect their traditional recipes from encroaching Norman French cultural influence, and this is where I think the idea of an 'Anglo-Saxon breakfast' first began.
While the Normans typically ate a substantial breakfast of bread, meat, cheese, and fruit, the Anglo-Saxons typically ate a breakfast of bread, porridge, or gruel made from grains like barley or oats, with cheese, butter, or honey, and we would not recognise anything they ate as an ingredient in the English breakfast we know and love today. Sausages wouldn't be commonly consumed for another few centuries, and if you suggested fried bacon and eggs nobody would know what you meant.
Regardless, this was when the idea of a 'special breakfast' formed in the minds of the local population, and as the Normans and Anglo-Saxons slowly became the English, they turned the idea of this breakfast into the English breakfast tradition. By the 12th century all that remained were the English and the idea that the English breakfast was a tradition worth preserving. It is likely that in the 12th and 13th centuries they did not really know which traditions they were defending anymore, or who they were defending them against, but they believed in the idea enough to consider it a tradition.
The idea of a truly English breakfast began to take shape in the 14th and 15th centuries among the gentry, who considered themselves to be the guardians of the traditional English country lifestyle and the cultural heirs of the Anglo-Saxons. The gentry were a distinct social class, made up of those with 'noble and distinguished blood', landowners and 'genteel' families of long descent, a privileged layer of society that included senior members of the clergy and the relatives of titled families. They saw it as their duty to keep alive the practices, values, culture and cuisine of those who came before them.
Their great country houses were the centre of huge country estates, and important hubs of local society where the pre-hunt English breakfast was considered to be an important social event, and in the old Anglo-Saxon tradition of hospitality, they used to provide hearty full breakfasts for visitors passing through, friends, relatives and neighbours. They liked to have a 'full English breakfast' before they went out to hunt, when hosting local community events, or during times of celebration.
The breakfast table was an opportunity for the gentry to display the 'wealth' of their estates in the quality of the meats, vegetables and ingredients sourced from the surrounding lands. It was also a chance to show off the skill of their cooks, and demonstrate their good taste.
They would have had a magnificent breakfast feast laid out before them containing dishes like baked halibut steaks, fried whiting, stewed figs, pheasant legs, broiled kidneys, pulled fowl, sheep’s tongues, potted pigeons, collared tongue, kidneys on toast, sausages with fried bread, pigs cheek and Melton pork pie, as well as the more familiar pork or blood sausages, and bacon made in the local way, it was very much a celebration and demonstration of traditional breakfast culinary culture.
By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, the gentry as a social class was in decline and a new wealthy social class of merchants, industrialists and businessmen now inhabited the upper crusts of society. The Industrial Revolution and the British Empire at its height were fantastic creators of wealth and wealthy elites saw the idea of the gentry as the social model to aspire towards. Those seeking to advance themselves socially emulated the habits of the gentry, the traditions of their country houses, and adopted their notion of the English breakfast as a staple of any important social event.
For aspiring Victorians, breakfast became an opportunity to demonstrate your wealth, good taste and social upbringing. It is the Victorians who took the tradition of the English breakfast and raised it into an art form, going to great lengths to secure traditional ingredients from around the country, making sure that they were prepared in the right way, and beautifully presented for guests.
Because a full English breakfast buffet was an incredibly expensive affair, it was mostly out of reach of the emerging middle class, and certainly out of reach of the poverty-stricken working class who usually breakfasted on bread, butter, porridge, with eggs, kippers, or herring reserved for special occasions or public holidays. Only the wealthy were trying to emulate the gentry and eating from lavish buffets comprised of traditional English breakfast dishes, it was an expensive tradition to adopt.
The Edwardian era is known as the golden age of long leisurely breakfasts and garden parties, basking in the sun that never set on the British empire. It was during this period that we first saw what we would recognise as an English breakfast begin to emerge and be served as standard in hotels, bed and breakfasts, on trains and at meetings across the country, the newly affluent middle classes began to want a full cooked English breakfast in the morning, rather than the simpler breakfast.
Standard ingredients made it easier to prepare and so a simpler form of the English breakfast began to spread nationally, with increasingly standardised ingredients of back bacon, eggs, traditional English sausage, smoked kippers, blood puddings, bubble and squeak, buttered beans, grilled haddock, tomato, fried bread and toast, served with jams, marmalades, tea/coffee and orange juice. The English breakfast was no longer a meal for just the wealthy, the middle class began to eat a full English breakfast regularly all over the country and began to redefine the tradition as their own.
This was when we began to see an English breakfast we would recognise become widely available on trains, cruise ships, hotels, bed and breakfasts, and in cafes and restaurants around the country. No matter where the British were, no matter what country there where in, how they were traveling, or what they were doing, they wanted an English breakfast in the morning so that they could start the day properly. The Edwardians at this point had a very clear sense of what constituted a proper breakfast, while other countries merely ate breakfast, we ate a uniquely traditional English breakfast.
The English breakfast tradition spread from the middle to the working classes when food prices began to drop as industrialisation and commercialisation began to take hold in the economy, advancements in agriculture provided higher yields, expanded transportation networks meant it was cheaper to get food to market. Mass production techniques enabled the efficient production of food at a lower cost, making the tradition much more accessible to the working classes than it ever had been before, and they quite naturally wanted to eat a proper English breakfast in the morning before a hard days work.
The tradition reached its peak in the early 1950s when roughly half of the British population began their day by eating an English breakfast we would recognise today, collectively turning what was once a meal for the wealthy upper and aspiring middle classes into a working-class staple. The English breakfast tradition was rapidly adopted by the working classes, and this era saw the emergence of the 'greasy spoon' cafe catering to them, which were often located close to where they worked.
Owned by English working-class people who served an English breakfast with pride, they upheld the tradition when it began to fall out of fashion with the rest of the country. They were located on industrial estates, close to ports, commercial, manufacturing and industrial centres, and for a long time they were the best places to get a real English breakfast, but as British industry slowly began to fall into decline, the greasy spoons and their version of the tradition fell into decline alongside it.
The collapse of British industry in the ’70s and ’80s foreshadowed the decline of the traditional greasy spoon cafes which fell dramatically over the following years, and with them the idea of an English breakfast as a culinary tradition to be proud of almost died as well. By the late ‘90s and the early ‘00s the English breakfast had become something cheap, fried, and served with chips, or Macdonald's hash browns. Even worse British farmers and butchers were increasingly being excluded from the tradition.
As British butchers farmers were slowly excluded by cheap imported bacon, puddings, and sausages, it became harder to get decent sausages, puddings, and bacon, made traditionally by a local butcher. As the big supermarket chains sacrificed quality in the name of higher profit margins, they squeezed British farmers for every penny of profit they could get, putting downward pressure on the quality of the traditional meat ingredients they were producing, and killing the regional variety in our breakfast.
A good English breakfast at the time was increasingly difficult to get unless you had a good butcher and made one at home. Many cafes began to serve English breakfasts made up of the cheapest imported ingredients on the market. At the time I remember thinking that there seemed to be a race to the bottom in terms of price, few establishments were taking pride in the quality and authenticity of their English breakfast, and the tradition had become a pale shadow of its former self.
By the early 00's the price of an English breakfast had fallen to its lowest point in history when compared to the average hourly wage. This race to the bottom in terms of price, the undermining of quality and authenticity in the tradition, and the greasy spoon idea that an English breakfast should be dirt cheap had slowly driven an iconic culinary tradition through the mud and into the gutter.
This was reason we founded the English Breakfast Society, we saw a historic tradition in decline and we acted to restore it to its former glory. We appointed ourselves the ‘official spokesperson’ for the tradition, representing and managing its public image, and over the last decade we have had thousands of conversations with journalists to discuss the history of the English breakfast. Our work has appeared in countless newspapers, radio stations, television programs, and magazines nationally, and internationally, as we worked to spread our message and raise the profile of the tradition.
Over time we worked to move the reputation of the English breakfast away from ‘cheap, fried, and imported’, and towards a new consensus for the tradition. This consensus governs the difference between a ‘real’ English breakfast, containing ingredients sourced from the British Isles, and the much cheaper fry up containing ingredients imported from overseas. This consensus emerged because we believe that the English breakfast should represent the very best ingredients our country has to offer, and showcase British quality and regional variety in support of British farmers and butchers.
We believe that a national icon of culinary culture should be represented by its best example, rather than its lowest common denominator, and we believe that the tradition should never exclude the British farmers and butchers who originally helped to make the tradition a great one.
Over the last decade, we have helped usher in a strong resurgence in popularity, nationally and internationally, and in 2024 the tradition is approaching the popularity it once enjoyed in the post-war era. You can now find an authentically English breakfast in most towns and cities across the country, and the tradition is currently experiencing a renaissance marked by a focus on the quality and source of its ingredients. British people everywhere are increasingly making incredible English breakfasts with pride and then posting pictures of them on social media for the rest of the world to see.
This social media activity has helped push the tradition of the English breakfast into the international media spotlight, and driven a surge in its popularity overseas. In 2024 it is now common to see people on social media posting pictures of the English breakfast they made, or ate, in far-flung countries. The tradition has moved on from being one contained mostly within British tourist hotspots, to one that is increasingly being adopted internationally by foreigners who want to breakfast like we do.
Fellows in the Foreign Office report that consuls and diplomats are increasingly using English breakfast events in our overseas embassies to bring foreigners closer to our culture, and they are always hugely popular events that attract strong interest, the tradition has become a bonafide form of British cultural soft power that is proudly being leveraged overseas by our diplomatic corps.
We are slowly shaking off the notion that an English breakfast should be cheaper than a fast food meal, and this is important for the future of the tradition because as long as it is confined by greasy spoon thinking there will never be any profit in a really good English breakfast that goes above and beyond the norm. You can go out for a cheap steak and chips costing five pounds, you can find a nice French bistro with steak frites costing thirty pounds, or you can go to a famous steakhouse where a Turkish man in sunglasses will sprinkle salt onto a gold plated steak for hundreds of pounds.
But we cannot yet say the same of the English breakfast.
You would struggle to spend much more than ten pounds on an English breakfast, and the best breakfasts are made at home by yourself or your family with love. While cheap fry ups are everywhere, and decent full English breakfasts can be found in many places, hardly anywhere serves an English breakfast offering a choice of regional sausage, bacon, pudding, and some of the older traditional English breakfast ingredients. If you wanted to go out and spend fifty pounds on a English breakfast reminiscent of the grand gentry breakfast spreads, I would not know where to send you.
We here at the Society encourage a higher standard when it comes to the English breakfast, we encourage regional and traditional authenticity in the ingredients, and we want to see a much greater variety of choice when it comes to the many different kinds of British sausages, bacon and puddings served in an English breakfast. We encourage the owners of dining establishments to do better, we ask that they list the origin of their ingredients on their menus, and more widely source their ingredients from different regions in order to add more variety to their breakfasts.
For more than a decade the English Breakfast Society has dedicated itself to restoring our tradition back to its former glory, and with your support we will continue our work into the next decade.
