Breakfast Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

'Forget about the stories you've read in history books.

'Our food customs are our most direct connection

'to the world of the past.

'This is history that you can touch,

'smell and above all, taste.'

It's lovely!

'The rituals of breakfast, lunch and dinner

'are something I think we take for granted

'as if they have always existed as they are now.'

I think I'd prefer it fried.

You'd have a heart attack by lunchtime!

'But unpick the stories of our three main meals

'and you discover gastronomic revolutions,

'technological leaps

and sometimes, gruesome realities.'

Decay, that would cause really bad breath.

Yes, I think I've had boyfriends like that.

'I never miss a good meal, but food is about more than just filling up.

'There's a rich and complex history to our daily mealtimes

'and that's what I'm setting out to explore.'

Right, dig in!

Of all our daily meals,

the first of the day has the most mysterious history.

The origins of some of the best-loved breakfast ingredients

that I'm going in search of are buried deep in our collective past.

But I want to start with what we think of now

as a traditional breakfast

and so I've come to the kind of establishment

where it still takes pride of place - the British caff.

In this case, a biker's caff.

The so-called English breakfast, or Full English,

is our best-known contribution to international cuisine.

This is, I suspect,

what most of us think of as the quintessential morning meal.

But there's something unexpected going on here

because this isn't the start of the working day,

it's the end of the week.

So, Friday night in a bikers' cafe, what could be nicer?

And you're having a Full English.

You can't beat a full English just after a long ride.

-500?

-It's not only a meal that you can eat in the morning, you know,

you can eat it pretty much at any point during the day

and I don't believe that they say it's unhealthy for you.

I don't believe that either, but do you ever have it for breakfast?

Most weekends, we have a fry-up of some kind.

Do you like your full English yourself?

I have been known to have one or 12, yes,

in fact, I got accused by my wife,

I'm actually on a diet at the moment,

but I was accused of living on them at one point.

-I can't think of anything better myself.

-Me neither!

The full English has become so iconic, in fact,

that it's now a dish to be enjoyed at any time of day or night.

For sure, we'll witness strange mixtures at this time of the day

when people are ordering a breakfast with a glass of Stella.

Personally, I prefer to eat mine in the morning

and nowadays without the pint of lager.

The phrase "bacon and eggs" is so familiar to us now,

you might never have wondered

how or why they were first put together on a plate.

But it's a story intricately bound up

with the customs and rhythms of life in a much earlier age,

back in the day when our morning meal first got its name.

In the Middle Ages,

the Catholic Church determined what you could eat and when.

One of the most important rules

was that no-one should eat until after morning mass.

Only then could you break your fast.

We also have the clergy to thank

for creating the combination of bacon and eggs,

although it came about almost by accident

because for roughly half the days of the year,

the church forbade people to eat meat at all.

On the days when you couldn't eat meat,

you would have to face something like this.

Eugh!

What's this?

Well, this is salt fish,

which has been...prepared

in a manner that would have been common in the Middle Ages,

so it's salt fish, which has been soaked

and served here with mustard and honey.

Do you that think grace would improve the smell?

Erm, probably not.

But it might be a good thing to do.

Bless us, O Lord, in these thy gifts...

'Father Tim Gardner is a member of the Dominican order,

'which was founded in the 13th century

'and he's something of an expert on mediaeval religious strictures.'

-Actually, it's better than it looks.

-It's a lot better than it looks.

Was the belief that a piscarian diet

was somehow...more virtuous?

There certainly was an idea

that certain kinds of food had physical effects

and, you know, we know that's true nowadays,

I mean, it's not such a strange idea,

you know, chocolate, double cream, they make you feel happy...

-That's the serotonin.

-Absolutely.

So, meat,

-well, meat is flesh.

-Mmm.

There was an idea around

that because meat is the product of sexual reproduction,

there was a clear connection between meat in particular and sex,

so you know, you eat meat, you're going to be thinking about sex,

which is not what you want monks and friars to be thinking about.

-Not if you take the bow of celibacy.

-Absolutely.

-That is fascinating.

I never actually thought of,

you know, the constrictions on meat eating

as being because meat was the product of obvious reproduction.

One of the reasons, yeah.

No, that's a new one to me.

PRAYERS ARE CHANTED

Nuns and monks had to observe the rules more strictly than most

but they applied to everyone

and the most intensive period of abstinence in mediaeval times

was Lent.

It became traditional to fill up immediately beforehand

on all the things you would not be allowed to eat,

which is why we have pancakes.

But this is also the point at which bacon and eggs comes into the story.

In Lent, it's a time when you can't eat eggs

and that's a significant source of protein.

Something else, of course, that you can't eat during Lent is meat,

so it's not just the butter and milk and eggs

that we use up on Shrove Tuesday,

but meat too,

-so the day before Shrove Tuesday used to be known as Collop Monday.

-Really?

-"Collop" meaning a bit of meat.

-Yeah.

And that was a time when scraps of meat might be used up,

so if it was pork, bacon,

you'd also have eggs that you were trying to use up

so there you have it.

-Your Full English.

-Bacon and eggs.

So that's how it all began, with a single day of indulgence

in the mediaeval calendar just before Lent.

But why have bacon with your eggs

and not some other kind of meat?

To find out more about the origin

of our best-known breakfast ingredient,

I've come to see an old friend of mine, Jan McCourt.

He's a pig farmer.

So what breeds have we got here?

Mainly purebred British Lops,

which is the rarest of the British rare breeds.

And they do us very well,

they have good, large litters, they're very hardy,

-and they taste very good.

-Yes! Absolutely, do they.

My favourite pig, British Lops.

And a couple of saddlebacks.

Looking at Jan's happy herd,

it's not hard to imagine the scene in a mediaeval village

when almost every cottager would have kept pigs.

They are wonderfully low-maintenance animals

and, given enough space,

they can be largely left to forage for themselves,

which is very much how Jan likes to do things.

What is your philosophy of stock rearing?

-Well, when I approached farming from a different life...

-From banking.

Yeah. I mean, I'd always wanted to farm

and to take as extensive as opposed to intensive an approach as possible,

and so rear pigs, for example, in family groups,

use the woodland as much as possible.

But that's very mediaeval, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. Pigs were kept in small numbers by individuals

and there was almost a ritual as you ran into the winter,

where the family pig would be killed

and the whole rota of using every little bit of the animal started.

Having killed one of their pigs,

someone in the mediaeval family

would have had the job of butchering it and curing it,

'just as Jan does.'

-Ah!

-Here we have half a pig!

Excellent. What's that off?

That's a British Lop/ Gloucester Old Spot cross.

So we count three ribs in,

pop the knife in,

feel the way through, alongside the bones,

mind yourself, there.

Just bring it over.

Of course, there'll be lots of butchers watching this

who will be incredibly critical.

I'm not a butcher,

-I'm a poet.

-A poet(!)

And we just take that out,

to leave the leg.

So there you have loin of pork.

This is a mixture of the salt and saltpetre

and the various ingredients that you need

to dry out the loin.

This process takes a minimum of a week.

'Most mediaeval families wouldn't be able to afford

'to eat a whole pig in one go, naturally.

'They would have had to make it last, perhaps for several months,

'and so to preserve the meat, they cured it.'

'Cured pork is, of course, bacon.'

Now, I've left the rind on

as traditionally, obviously, rind should stay on the bacon

and it's one of the delights of it.

Now, I can feel the moisture

already beginning to leach out because of the salt

so normally, that would have been done in a container,

and then it would go into the tub

and you turn it every day for a week.

So do you have one you cured earlier?

I have. We'll nip over to the kitchen in a minute

-and I've got it all sliced up and ready to get the sizzle going.

-Yes!

BACON SIZZLES

The smell of breakfast.

In a lovely hot griddle pan,

it almost needs no time at all.

'But there's an important fact to remember in all of this.'

'Apart from Collop Monday, most mediaeval families

'probably couldn't afford to have bacon for breakfast.'

-Shall we give it a go?

-Absolutely.

'Their pigs were, after all, their main source of meat of any kind.'

Like the piece we cured,

this is just the short back.

Help yourself.

Mmm. It's lovely.

We think of bacon as breakfast now,

but historically, it was the staple food of almost everybody

and it would have tasted something like this.

But also, the whole pig is curable.

You could literally bone the whole pig out from top to tail

and bury it in salt.

There are records of people doing it in old Roman sarcophagi,

especially in the Savernake Forest.

-I kind of couldn't think of a better way to go, really.

-No, quite.

Bacon, in fact, only became associated with breakfast

in the 17th century, an age of relative prosperity

when people were no longer so tied to the land.

'Which leads me to wonder what, if anything,

'do we know about our earliest breakfast customs?'

This is University College London,

my old alma mater, and I've come

to meet Dr Ian Mortimer, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society,

to find out what constituted a mediaeval morning meal

and who ate what.

Dr Mortimer, breakfast -

did everybody eat the same sort of breakfast

or was it very divisive by structure and class?

It is hugely divided, from the top of society down to the bottom.

Mediaeval society is hugely hierarchical.

An aristocrat would pay seven shillings for a fish

at a time when a working man would earn fourpence in a day.

At the top end of society,

it can be a matter of choice whether you have breakfast.

At the bottom end of society, people still starve to death

so for them, it's not a question of whether they have any breakfast,

it's whether they have any food at all.

What's the earliest reference you've found to breakfast?

I have come across one reference which is possibly 12th century,

to choristers at St Paul's

being given breakfasts if they'd been up singing at night,

and that's quite specific, in bread and ale.

What's the first aristocratic reference?

As far as I can see, it's 1297,

when the Countess Joan de Valence is recorded to have had breakfast

and it's not just a little breakfast for her,

it's for her whole household,

which may have been as many as 100 people.

She also had 20 poor people along,

so this was a big breakfast and clearly a certain degree of ceremony,

much more like a formal dinner.

So it seems that if you were part of an aristocratic household,

breakfast came with the job.

And the more extravagant the lord or lady was, the better the breakfast.

By far the best account of what aristocrats might eat for breakfast,

and everybody else in their household who was of a certain rank,

comes from the Earl of Northumberland's account,

which is 1512

and to give you an idea of what

the Earl of Northumberland and his lady might sit down to,

first a loaf of bread in two trenchers,

then two manchetts, which was very high-quality white bread,

a quart of beer, so a couple of pints to begin with,

a quart of wine, because of their status, of course,

half a chine of mutton,

or else a chine of beef.

Beef has always been the favourite food of the English aristocracy,

in fact, I notice Edward IV also having beef for his breakfasts,

-so if you could afford it, in their day, you could eat pretty well.

-Hmm!

Breakfast in a 16th-century aristocratic household, then,

'was likely to be a substantial meal.'

And that trend continued after the Reformation,

which did away with the Catholic Church's restrictions

on eating food like eggs, milk and cheese.

Before long, recipes for dishes like scrambled eggs began to appear

and even boiled eggs were a novelty.

I've come to Gainsborough Old Hall in Lincolnshire

to meet historic food specialist Caroline Yeldham

and she's going to begin by demonstrating for me

the old mediaeval way of cooking eggs,

which was to roast them.

-Hello, I'm Clarissa.

-Hello.

-Caroline.

-What are you up to?

Well, we're starting with some roasted eggs,

which I've got sitting in the ashes.

This is a very ancient way of cooking eggs.

Whenever I cook them, I always find them a bit indigestible.

But it's why boiled egg's become much more popular.

And how long do you cook them for?

Well, that depends on how hot the ashes are

and that's a matter of trial and error

because if you make them too hot, then the eggs will explode,

so there is a risk!

Do we think it's done?

-Definitely.

-Do we think it's digestible?

You're welcome to try it.

I will try it.

Mmm. Not bad at all.

-Oh, good.

-Not bad at all.

I think I'd have preferred it fried, but...

CAROLINE LAUGHS

Thankfully for egg lovers, help was soon at hand

in the distinguished form of Robert May,

who in 1660 published the first comprehensive English cookery book.

The Accomplished Cook contained over 1,000 recipes,

including instructions on fried eggs, a early form of scrambled eggs

and 21 kinds of omelette,

a recently imported French dish.

Omelettes are now a breakfast favourite

but you'd be hard-pressed to go to work after May's recipe

according to the Turkish mode.

It calls for expensive luxuries

like lemons imported from Spain or North Africa,

which were only available to the rich,

cinnamon from Ceylon

and a particular type of roasted meat.

Hare omelette, that's something out of the ordinary, isn't it?

There seems to be an explosion in the 17th century

of people finding different things to put in omelettes.

I've got some chopped almonds here

and chestnuts.

And pine kernels.

Gosh, this is going to be very dramatic. What's that?

This is cinnamon.

-Nutmeg...

-And some freshly grated nutmeg.

So that needs to go be mixed

-and popped on the fire and heated through.

-Mm-hmm.

The principle of making an omelette might seem straightforward to us

but although the basic ingredients weren't new,

the equipment to cook them was.

After centuries of literally roasting in front of an open fire,

cooks now had access to a new piece of kitchen technology.

With a brazier they could cook with charcoal

and that meant they had much more control over temperature.

Well done! Hooray!

-This is the hare mixture.

-Mmm.

Put these on the edge

and slices of lemon, which, of course, are very extravagant and fashionable.

-Scatter some...

-Marigold petals?

-Yes.

Very exciting.

-Give you a good layer.

-Never would have thought of doing hare this way.

Gosh, that's nice. Gosh, that's really, really nice!

I love all the different nuts, as well as the hare.

Mmm, wouldn't mind another one of those!

Robert May's omelette is almost certainly too elaborate to be

an early morning dish, but it shows how enthusiastically our cooks

took up those basic recipes we now think of as breakfast food.

And when it came to eggs at breakfast,

a physician of the time, Tobias Venner, urged restraint.

Venner's medical book on the right way to a long life was the first

to use the word obesity,

and he recommends for breakfast just "a couple of poached eggs"

together with some bread and butter and a good draught of claret!

Wine or beer was the traditional morning drink for centuries,

but our early morning drinking habits began to change with

the arrival of coffee in the 1620s.

Before coffee became a breakfast pick-me-up, it was a social drink

served in coffee houses which first appeared in the 1650s.

But it was tea imported from China and first sold publicly in 1657

that was adopted more quickly

as a domestic drink, not least because it was easier to prepare.

Tea was certainly the beverage of choice in this London household

when it was the home of Dr Samuel Johnson,

the renowned author and lexicographer.

But, surprising as it may sound,

tea-drinking became a serious social concern during the 18th century

'amongst a certain class of person...'

Thank you. How lovely!

'..as historian Jane Pettigrew explained to me.'

We're in Dr Johnson's house,

and he was a man who, without being harsh, was addicted to tea.

He called himself a shameless and hardened tea drinker.

And he drank it right through the day and well into the night, I think.

-Not everyone was quite so keen on tea, were they?

-No.

It's interesting that as the labouring classes began to drink

more tea, some people seemed to thoroughly disapprove

and you wonder whether it was because they really seriously thought

tea was bad for people,

or because they disapproved of it being brought down into the lower classes.

This was an aristocratic drink, a luxury and expensive beverage.

How dare these people drink tea?!

But some quite prominent people wrote very serious tracts

against tea drinking.

Jonas Hanway, social commentator, decried the fact that

chambermaids and housemaids were losing their bloom

because of tea-drinking!

This was quite an argument that was rattling around in the background.

At the same time, other people promoting tea

as a health-giving beverage.

So, by what date would it have become regular at breakfast,

or more normal at breakfast?

I think probably by the late 1740s, 1750s, it's beginning to appear

at the breakfast table, and breakfast rooms are actually a separate room

in the house, so this was where you went in the mornings

to actually have your breakfast tea.

The arrival of the breakfast room, the breakfast table

and breakfast tea completed the picture of the morning meal

as we recognise it today,

although with rather more niceties than we have now.

So, tea and breakfast.

Yes, here we are at the beginning of the 19th-century

and tea has taken its place at breakfast as the recognised drink.

The soft boiled egg is particularly relevant,

because the first reference anywhere in literature to a soft boiled egg is Jane Austen's Emma.

Mr Woodhouse is proposing to Mrs Bates that she should have

a soft boiled egg.

"Serle understands the boiling of an egg better than anyone.

"I would not recommend an egg boiled by anyone but Serle."

So how do we know these are the sort of things that Jane Austen

and her contemporaries would have been eating at breakfast?

Literally references. I mean, wonderful source,

the boiled eggs in Emma,

the brioche, I think in Northanger Abbey, where she said,

"I wish you would not talk so much about the French bread

"served at Northanger", and that, of course, is the bread.

The brioche.

And literary references seem to infer that it was a stretched meal.

Just suited your lifestyle.

I suppose, but then also, breakfast parties became very fashionable

and started at ten and ran through until three,

four, maybe five o'clock in the afternoon,

so not breakfast at all, but a party, a major all-day party!

-How funny! There's something that could catch on again!

-Yes!

But the offerings of a Jane Austen breakfast party are mere morsels

compared with that most lavish expression of our morning meal -

the English country house breakfast.

Country houses were important fixtures in the aristocratic social circuit,

and parties based around shooting or hunting

might last for days or even weeks at a time.

Chatsworth House in Derbyshire

is a monument to the most refined kind of country living

and it's a place where, in the 19th century, English breakfast

reached new heights of extravagance.

Christine Robinson is the current head housekeeper.

She has worked here for more than 30 years

but her knowledge of the history of the house goes back much further.

-Here we are in the Great Dining Room.

-Wow! Look at this!

-It is an amazing room, isn't it?

-Incredible.

The table is set here for dinner but this is where the guests

would have come down and had their breakfast.

And there would have been a buffet on the side as there is here,

which would have been laden with cold meats, game pie, probably pheasant,

as they would have been shooting, after all, over the weekend.

-Lot of pheasant.

-Lot of pheasant, yes.

And devilled pheasant legs, delicious for breakfast.

The main dining table would have had freshly prepared foods,

different ways of cooked eggs, fish, there would have been lots

of different sorts of breads and also tea, coffee and also hot chocolate.

Why did people come here in particular?

-Because this was a winter house, wasn't it?

-It was a winter house.

The family were staying in their other houses

at different times of the year.

They came to Chatsworth from October through probably until February,

and so it would have been an opportunity really to gather their friends

and acquaintances together, to go shooting, to show what Chatsworth

had to offer, and part of that was the lavishness of the breakfast table.

-You've a family association with Chatsworth?

-Yes, I have.

My grandmother was the youngest of 11 children born at Beeley,

which is three miles away, and her mother, my great-grandmother,

used to come and help out in the kitchens when they were

really busy at this kind of fabulous house party we're talking about.

We had a cook when I was growing up who trained at Chatsworth,

and this was regarded as being a very good reference, because the amount of experience

she'd have had training here, and she was a very good cook.

I owe it all to her.

But despite all the sumptuousness on offer,

if you were a lady, you might prefer to start the day

with breakfast in bed.

Just coming now into the Wellington bedroom named in honour

of the Duke of Wellington, one of the many guests who came to stay.

-Fabulous room, isn't it?

-Fantastic. I mean the wallpaper is just stunning.

It's hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, and then wonderful bed here, where

the lady's maid would have brought her mistress tea and toast in bed.

'And of course, breakfast is the one meal of the day a lady can

'still eat in bed without being thought of as slovenly.'

What's through there?

We've got the dressing room, and this is where

the gentleman would have slept if he had a late night at cards.

Rather than come in and disturb his wife,

he would have slept in the smaller bed in here.

If he was late at cards or perhaps sleeping in somebody else's room!

Oh, well! I wouldn't like to say!

A lot of corridor creeping, I think!

If the Chatsworth corridors did creak,

they must have been at their noisiest in the days

when the notorious Marlborough House set and the future King Edward VII

were frequent guests.

THEY CHATTER

'Hannah Obee is the curator at Chatsworth

'and she's been making a study of the social life of the house.'

-Althorp, Earl Spencer?

-Yeah, exactly.

Chatsworth, of course, was famous for country house parties with

country house breakfast as part and parcel of the celebrations,

but tell me a bit more about the parties.

The parties, I think, really took off in the eighth Duke's time,

but towards the end of his life, because he had his 30-year

love affair with Louise, who was Duchess of Manchester, and after

her husband died, they got married and she brings all these amazing

people up from London and have these incredible house parties,

so it really is a high point of Edwardian high octane glamour!

High octane glamour! What have we got here?

What we've actually got here is an illustration from 1901,

when there was a house party for Edward VII and Queen Alexandra,

but also present was his mistress Mrs Keppel.

You've got the eighth Duke of Devonshire

and you've also got his new wife Louise or Lottie, as she was known,

so she and Mrs Keppel are flanking Edward VII.

One of Edward VII's favourite breakfasts and I don't know

if he had it here, was you hollowed out an onion,

boiled an onion and hollowed it out,

and then filled it with a dish of chicken livers cooked in cream

and brandy, put it back in the onion, put the lid on, just give it

a little longer in the oven, and then he'd have that for breakfast.

I just can't imagine having that for breakfast,

but when you think about how many pheasants

he was going out to shoot when he left at about ten o'clock

in the morning, that might actually make a bit of sense.

We've got a wonderful photograph of him just on the back of a pony,

going over the moors, looking very... very heavy going, I think it was.

Maybe that's why he needed a good breakfast in the country,

but I'm not sure so much in London his excuse would have been.

I think gluttony!

All the same, Edward VII's hugely indulgent breakfast

was very much in keeping with the spirit of the age.

A recommended menu for a large party would typically have more than

two dozen hot and cold dishes, including such delights

as eggs in aspic,

coquilles of shrimp...

..hashed venison

and broiled pigeons.

I've chosen the very particular Victorian breakfast speciality,

and I'm going to ask Chatsworth's current head chef Dan Brazill

to cook it for me.

-Hello. You must be Daniel.

-Hello.

-I've got a chore for you.

-OK.

I have here a rather strange book by an anonymous Victorian gentleman

called Major L,

and he gives breakfasts for large parties for the month of August.

Kidneys, lobster and a sole colbert.

Ah, sole a la colbert.

Elme Francatelli, chef to Queen Victoria, gives a recipe

for sole a la colbert, which is sole fried

and then you take the bone out,

stuff it with maitre-d'hotel butter, pour over some maitre-d'hotel sauce.

-Seems like a lot of butter for breakfast.

-Well, over to you!

Do you not have a cooked breakfast?

I very rarely have time for a cooked breakfast, these days.

I don't think many people do.

Maybe a treat on the weekend, on a Sunday or perhaps the birthday

if the wife is feeling generous!

So, I've got some seasoned flour here.

You've rubbed it over with flour

and you're painting it with the beaten egg.

We're using lemon sole today.

I would imagine Queen Victoria would have had Dover soul.

And then you're going to dip it in some breadcrumbs,

fry it in very hot lard or frying fat

to swim it.

Swimming in fat.

He says cook it until it's well done.

I couldn't cook fish until it was well done.

When done cleverly, cleverly - we're relying on you to be clever -

remove the backbone without deforming the fish.

It's coming.

Look at that.

I am most impressed!

Finally we're told to fill the fish

with two ounces of maitre-d'hotel butter,

that's butter with chopped parsley and onion,

and then serve it with maitre-d'hotel sauce -

a white sauce made with another two ounces of butter.

-Sole a la colbert.

-Amazing.

Extraordinary to think they ate that for breakfast.

You'd have a heart attack by lunchtime!

Mmm. Very nice, but not, I think, for breakfast.

Yes, I think as a dinner dish, it's very nice,

but for breakfast, not for me.

Nor me, neither.

And in case you are wondering, a dish of sole a la colbert

comes in at a little over 1,800 calories.

'The perfect start for a day on the moors.'

Well done!

In the meantime, throughout the 19th-century our cities

were growing and a new middle class was emerging.

They may not have had country estates, but they did want a few

luxuries to go with their bacon and eggs, and so they went shopping.

And there was one establishment that prided itself on knowing

exactly what the right sort of person should have

on their breakfast table.

Fortnum and Mason was founded by a former royal footman in 1707,

but by the 19th century, it was providing the newly rich

with access to goods that had once been the preserve of the gentry

'as the store's archivist, Andrea Tanner explained to me.'

It's lovely to be here again.

I spent a lot of my childhood coming round Fortnum's with my mother.

-Welcome back.

-Thank you very much.

When I was a child, Fortnum's was a great place

if you needed it for pointing you in the right direction.

Yes, I think the shop has always had an educative role.

When the shop began, its customers were only the aristocracy

and the landed gentry, but you know, the British Empire grew,

people became more prosperous and those who had a bit of money

and a bit of leisure wanted to have what the aristocracy had.

They wanted to know the right thing to eat,

the right thing to wear, the right thing to say.

So the sort of thing Fortnum's would do would be,

you know, someone wants to know what sort of tea the Duke of Grafton has,

gently you would be directed towards a suitable sort of tea,

a suitable blend of coffee,

particular made up dishes for breakfast,

because we had an enormous department,

where if you weren't up to making your veal pates and croquettes

and so on, we would make them for you and get them to you

in plenty of time for breakfast.

But even when I was young and you came to Fortnam's,

it wasn't like this, you didn't handle things.

No, you weren't allowed to touch things. Heaven forfend.

You were met at the door by a gentleman in a frock coat

who would bow to you, and he had a little notebook.

He'd determine your name if he didn't know who you were and determine

what you would like to buy, and then he would lead you around and make

suggestions to you, but you weren't allowed to actually touch anything.

You were allowed to taste things but no, no, and then of course,

no money passed hands at Fortnum's in those days.

Everything was on account, so you got to enjoy the goods a good month

or two before you actually paid for them.

Another thing you could definitely want for your breakfast table

was marmalade, a delicacy which was probably first brought to

this country in the 1660 s by one of my great heroines,

the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza

'when she married Charles II.'

Wonderful sight.

This is our oldest marmalade, which is Burlington breakfast marmalade.

You can see the peel in there, and this was made for

the first Earl of Burlington, and made to a recipe that actually

was his chef's recipe, so we were given the recipe in the 1730s.

-Have you always sort of made marmalade?

-No, we haven't.

It wouldn't have occurred to us to make marmalade,

because our customers had staff who made home-made marmalade,

but we'd have sold them the sugar and also the citrus fruits to make it.

How brilliant. I love that!

But it was really the First World War,

and the demands of the Western Front,

that's when we started making our own marmalade.

But we didn't put them in jars, we put them in tins,

because it was much safer to send it out to the officers.

We used to send it to my father.

I have letters - or had letters -

which say things like, "I need some more marmalade,"

or, "That fruit cake was particularly good.

-"That Fortnum's one - can you send me another one."

-Excellent.

Well, he was in good company,

because Clemmie used to send Winston Churchill marmalade from Fortnum's

-during the First World War.

-Excellent.

Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras,

the country house breakfast was the model of early-morning refinement.

And the Victorians in particular

kept on inventing and adapting new dishes.

Andrea and I are going to sample two of the best known.

Thank you very much.

Of course, everybody thinks that kippers are really old,

that it's an old method of curing fish.

Yes, it almost looks mediaeval,

but it's a 19th-century English invention, yes.

1861 in Craster.

Today, we smoke herring in the way in which the Scots smoke salmon.

-Oh, really?

-Yes.

-Right.

So it's, what, 150 years old? That's it. But very delicious.

Very delicious.

And, of course, now very much associated with breakfast.

Indeed. Indeed.

Much older on the table would be what I'm having, which is kedgeree.

Yes, it's a very ancient dish.

It was originally the preferred breakfast of the poor in India,

made up of just rice and lentils.

It was taken up by the Mughal emperors during their fasting period.

They had it for breakfast, too.

They were the people who first added fish to it.

'But, of course, it was those intrepid officers

'who set off to build the British Empire

'who brought the recipe for kedgeree

'back to their breakfast tables at home.'

So, you've got this coming back from India as early as the 18th century.

Yes. But, of course, you've got smoked haddock in your kedgeree,

and that is a Victorian introduction.

The fish in India was never smoked, it was always fresh.

But by the time kedgeree

became part of the Great British country house breakfast

smoked haddock became absolutely de rigueur,

you could not use another form of fish

or it wasn't a proper kedgeree.

Really? And lentils had long since gone.

They had long since gone.

I think the lentils disappeared on the boat

coming from India to Tilbury.

So, it was a combination of staple foods,

aristocratic customs and imported influences

that gave rise to the rich and varied traditions

of our morning meal.

But then, just as the culinary crescendo of the English breakfast

reached its climax at the end of the 19th century,

from over in America came the first rumblings of a revolution

that would make the country house breakfast history.

The man in the hat is Dr John Harvey Kellogg.

His name is synonymous

with the best-known breakfast cereal in the world -

although it was not the first.

Today, cornflakes of all brands are a breakfast staple,

but they were conceived as part of a much grander scheme

to convert us all to vegetarianism.

Dr Kellogg pursued this aim with evangelical fervour,

because he was a member of an energetic new Christian church,

the Seventh-day Adventists,

who interpreted passages from the Book of Genesis

as an instruction from God that mankind should not eat meat.

Like many of history's most important moments,

the invention of the cornflake in 1894 was an accident

and it's one I'm going to see recreated here in Leeds

at the University's School Of Food Science And Nutrition.

Dr Kellogg and his brother, Will,

had been working with wheat rather than corn.

'And these three young students, Callum, Zach and Charlotte,

'are going to repeat the experiment for me.'

So, Callum, what have we got here?

This is the raw wheat grain,

which John Harvey Kellogg actually made his first flake from.

Everybody knows he was famous for using corn,

but his first experiments were with wheat.

-It's quite hard.

-It is very hard.

In its raw form,

you can't really do much with it, with regards to eating.

So this is it soaking, is it?

Yes, it is. The grain will take up some water

and it will hydrolyse some of the starch and soften it a little bit.

And this is typically kept

at approximately 5 to 15 degrees overnight.

After soaking the wheat grain,

the Kellogg brothers boiled it for one hour.

And then they dried it again,

which is where Zach takes over.

And how does this dry them?

Hot air just passes over the top of them,

and that just helps remove some of the excess moisture

that you've got, built up on the surface.

-So it's a giant hairdryer, really?

-It is a giant hairdryer.

Initially, one of the problems faced by the Kellogg's Brothers,

when they were producing the first wheat flakes,

was that if there was too much moisture, when they put them through the roller,

it just mushed into a horrible mass and a bit of a sludge.

And if they're too dry, after this - if you dry them too much -

when you roll them through,

they'll just crack like hard bits of rice.

-Oh, really?

-I'll just pop the dryer on now.

'The Kellogg brothers didn't have a hairdryer, naturally,

'and they struggled to get their grain to the right consistency.

'Until, that is,

'they accidentally left a batch standing for several hours.

'By the time the brothers noticed their mistake,

'the grains were mouldy,

'but they were also the perfect consistency for rolling into flakes,

'as these are now.'

Now we've laid them all out on the sheet,

it's just time to cover them over and pass them through the roller.

And that's my job.

Just like an old-fashioned mangle.

Look at that!

A couple of them have merged into each other.

It doesn't look a lot like cornflakes.

So, Charlotte, you've got the flakes here,

beautifully rolled by me.

-Yes, very well done.

-What are you going to do now?

Lay it on a baking tray

and that is what I'm going to be doing right now.

It takes a lot of patience, actually.

Extraordinary. You would think by this stage

they'd have given up, really.

How long do you bake them for?

About 15 to 20 minutes.

'Now, remember,

'the first batch of wheat that the Kellogg brothers rolled was mouldy.

'But they soon developed their own drying technique

'to produce edible flakes.'

All right. It looks like we've got a full tray,

ready to be popped into the oven.

All right. So these are nice and warm, right out of the oven.

If you would like to give a taste.

It doesn't taste all that wonderful.

It doesn't really evoke something

that you would want to have for breakfast, does it?

And so, after a range of experiments,

we found out that if we mashed up the wheat grains...

-Mm-hmm.

-..and we chop it up to break up the husk a bit more...

..and we roll it up, follow the same procedure as before,

and with that, we end up with the end result of this.

-That's much better, isn't it, visually?

-Yes.

That actually tastes considerably better.

-How extraordinary. Well done.

-Thank you.

-That's fascinating.

So that's how they were invented, but it doesn't explain

why Dr Kellogg's Corn Flakes became SO popular.

-This is the ten gates of digestion...

-'I've come to meet another doctor.'

..without saying constipation once...

'Dr Kaori O'Connor is a historian from University College London.

'She grew up eating Kellogg's cereals

'and she has a very full knowledge of the man behind them.'

John Harvey Kellogg, Victorian obsessive.

Corn Flakes was where he kicked off, was it?

No, he started back with grains of all kinds,

because the Seventh-day Adventists belief was

God's own food was grain, vegetables, nuts.

-Nuts being the obvious word.

-Yes, indeed so.

He invented peanut butter while he was at it.

He was a very, very innovative and inventive man,

but mainly he was trying to save America through a change of diet.

So he wanted to invent all sorts of grain-based foods

and he was particularly challenged by breakfast,

because it was the beginning of the day

and the beginning of the digestive cycle

and he wrote a wonderful book called The Itinerary Of A Breakfast,

where he charts breakfast

as it goes through the ten gates of the body, and exits.

And he thought that nature should provide the perfect laxative

in the way of grain.

So from the beginning,

he was always trying to develop good grain-based ways to start the day.

The Victorians were completely obsessed with their bowels

and constipation and regularity.

It was the thing of the age.

Well, absolutely, and he was prime among them.

He also began to think that oatmeal porridge, cooked porridge,

which was the great Victorian standby, was no good,

because it gets stuck on its way through the ten gates of the body.

So what was really needed

was something that was quick, easy and cold.

The testing ground for the Corn Flakes recipe

that Dr Kellogg and his brother devised

was the Sanitarium, a health spa in Michigan that the doctor managed.

It was the guests here

who were the first to try the original cornflake in 1895.

So this is the foundation of the Kellogg's empire,

these golden flakes of corn - very, very light.

Now, when they first did the Corn Flakes,

they were slightly tasteless.

So one day, when the doctor was on a trip,

the brother decided to improve on the recipe

by adding malt and sugar to the flavouring.

This is the Corn Flake we have now, transformed it -

instant success.

But the doctor never, ever wanted to sell any of these cereals,

he just wanted to let them be for the people in the Sanitarium

and do them by mail order.

And the brother said, "My God, we could make a fortune,

"why don't we sell them to the world?"

And...they fell out.

The decision to sell Corn Flakes as a product

drove a wedge between the two Kellogg brothers.

It was the younger one, Will Keith,

who founded the cereal company in 1906

and became a multimillionaire.

The principle of adding sugar to cereals

to stop them tasting like horse food, as Will K once said,

created a breakfast bandwagon.

The doctor's idea of an unadulterated grain-based meal

was transformed into a whole range of products,

some of which, the Kellogg company found,

could be marketed very effectively to children.

And this is their masterstroke.

BOTH: Frosties!

Yes, with Tony the Tiger.

One of the most iconic characters ever created for anything -

the king of the breakfast table.

-Grrr-eat!

-Grrr-eat! Right - that's it.

Compare this, which is a sugar-covered cornflake,

to a standard cornflake.

Well, this is twice as heavy - it must be the sugar. But there we are.

-And the child is going to want to rush for the sugar.

-Absolutely.

Sugar Frosted Flakes, as they were known in America,

were launched in 1952,

but the sweetening of cereals didn't stop there.

Six years later, an even more tempting

child-friendly product appeared.

Coco Pops.

So you not only have something that's sugared, but you have it with cocoa.

And then you put on milk and it turns into chocolate milk.

I mean, who can resist that?

Erm... Me?

And think of what the doctor is saying by this time -

spinning in his grave like a turbine, I should think.

'I don't know if I agree with the doctor's prognosis

'that everyone would benefit from a grain-based laxative.

'All the same, even though there's less sugar in many Kellogg's cereals now than there used to be,

'I have to say, a sweetened cereal for breakfast isn't for me.'

I've come, finally, to a place where

almost every conceivable kind of morning meal is on offer -

the hotel breakfast room.

I'm meeting writer Tom Parker Bowles,

a food-lover after my own heart.

-Morning, Clarissa.

-Ah, Tom. How are you?

Lovely to see you.

Right. Breakfast.

Absolutely. You have that one.

'I've asked Tom to join me

'to reflect on what has happened to our idea of an English breakfast.'

-Duck eggs with soldiers.

-Thank you very much.

-Bacon and eggs, sir.

-Thank you very much.

-You're very welcome, sir.

So, very traditional, Tom, bacon and eggs.

I think bacon and eggs

is one of the great breakfast combinations of all time.

Pig and egg - sublime.

-And bacon is a great British art, isn't it?

-What was that lovely thing?

The hen is involved, but the pig is totally committed.

This is a proper breakfast.

It provides you with...

Admittedly, I'm not off now to go and work the fields,

or go down the mine, or anything particularly physical.

But to start the day with a breakfast like this puts you in a good mood.

Whenever I go away and stay at a hotel,

I always have the full English,

because it's something quite wonderful and glorious.

And do you think, when people go to hotels,

even people who don't normally eat breakfast,

that they'll have breakfast?

Yes. It's luxury to have breakfast now, I think,

to have a cooked breakfast.

If you're obsessed with fats and meats and that sort of stuff,

well, you're not going to get any pleasure out of it, are you?

But my wife never eats a cooked breakfast,

but if we go somewhere she'll always have it.

I saw the most extraordinary thing the other day,

there was a Frenchman sitting in the hotel where I was,

and he had a plate of bacon and a couple of boiled eggs turns up,

and he breaks open the boiled eggs

and scoops them on top of the bacon and eats them.

I said, "Why are you doing that?" And he say, "This is what I like."

I tell you what, that's a very rare thing -

to see a Frenchman who understands a good English breakfast.

Cos you go the Continent

and there are many great things about the Continent,

but breakfast ain't one of them.

We could not have built an empire on croissants and rubbish pastries.

You know, this is empire-building stuff.

The Battle of Waterloo

was won over a plate of bacon and eggs.

-It probably was!

-Can you imagine going to war on a croissant?

That's why they always lost, I think, to be honest. Good old pig and egg...

I mean, pig is the key to a good breakfast, isn't it?

What do you think influences people's choice of breakfasts?

Sadly, these days, time.

I mean, everybody is in a rush in the morning, for various reason.

They're rushing to work, they're rushing to get the children to school,

they're rushing to everything.

It's just quick - rush, rush, rush.

When I give the children boiled eggs,

you know, I'm rather rushing them through,

whereas you wouldn't do that at dinner.

So therefore, going back to the big full English breakfast,

it is a treat, because you need time to cook it, to eat it,

dare I say, to digest it, as well.

We spend three hours over dinner,

why not spend a bit of time over breakfast?

Breakfast cereals have been around for more than 100 years,

but I prefer our older cooked traditions,

although maybe not so "a la Colbert".

Like all good food, a good breakfast comes at a cost,

and as much as anything, the real cost these days is time,

which is perhaps why we mostly restrict our morning indulgences

to when someone else is doing the cooking.

Next week, I'll be looking at lunch,

a meal that 300 years ago didn't even exist,

but which has been adapting

to the changes in our working lives ever since.

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