THE FULL ENGLISH BREAKFAST

Peer through the condensation-misted glass of an English café and you’ll see all kinds of people – from hungry workers to families, pensioners and hungover students – happily tucking into the same meal: a full English breakfast.

The mixture of ingredients we now recognise as a full English reflects a centuries-long coming together of the nation’s favourite breakfast items. As the food historian Colin Spencer writes in his book, British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, it all started with bacon and eggs on toast. This combination has been enjoyed since as early as the 1600s and was established as de rigueur by the Victorian era.

British breakfasts grew in proportion to the population’s wealth and diversity. By the First World War, a standard range of full English ingredients had emerged, including sausages, black pudding, baked beans and grilled tomatoes. Later generations of home cooks and café chefs added extras such as mushrooms and hash browns to create the lavish breakfast feasts so well known and loved today. The entire, culture-spanning variety of British breakfast items is majestically explored in Felicity Cloake’s foodie travel tome, Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey.

Modern full English breakfasts rarely include every last ingredient associated with the meal. Except for a few core components – especially eggs and toast – the breakfast is usually made with a selection of each person’s favourite items. This may explain the national statistical anomaly that more than 80% of English people agree on enjoying a full English breakfast, according to a 2017 YouGov survey.

The essentials:

• Eggs – one or two of them, fried, poached or scrambled.
• Back bacon – this relatively thick and juicy type of bacon is generally preferred to streaky bacon. Use one or two rashers.
• Toast with butter – the bread could be a traditional farmhouse loaf, a sourdough, or a Chorleywood loaf – one of the familiar squishy cuboids sold in supermarkets since the 1960s. The butter could be either salted or unsalted.
• Tomatoes – grilled or fried cherry tomatoes, or field tomatoes, tend to be the most enjoyable breakfast picks.
• Mushrooms – grilled or fried, possibly with garlic and thyme.
• Baked beans – probably made by Heinz, sometimes served in a ramekin to prevent heat loss and improper mingling with other ingredients.
• Sausages – whatever you enjoy!

THE ABOVE ESSENTIALS DO VARY FROM PERSON TO PERSON