User:AuricArgent/sandbox

Breakfast
Breakfast held a position of lesser import in the medieval period, since dinner was eaten at nine or ten o'clock in the morning. Breakfast would be a simple meal of bread and ale for most people if it was eaten at all, though beef, fish, chicken, and wine and ale are recorded among the nobility and their servants. In 1626, farm laborers were recorded as having breakfast at eight in the morning, after working since daybreak. By that point dinner had moved to noon, and by the eighteenth century breakfast was well established among the upper class. In 1705, Lady Grizel Baillie dictated a schedule of meals for her daughter that began with breakfast at nine in the morning, dinner between noon and two, and supper before bedtime at nine o'clock at night. In 1786, Lord Sheffield's daughter had breakfast at ten in the morning, dinner at four in the afternoon, and supper at ten at night. Insight into breakfast during the early nineteenth century is provided by Jane Austen's novels. Some of her houses contain breakfast rooms, and Northanger Abbey boasts a set of specialty breakfast china. Pork chops and boiled eggs are eaten by characters for breakfast in chapter eleven of Mansfield Park (1814). By the beginning of the Victorian era breakfast had developed into a proper meal, with a more comfortable atmosphere and lighter food than the formal evening dinner.

The following are the basic ingredients that could be found in an early Victorian breakfast: eggs (roasted, poached, or boiled), bacon, sausages, fish, pork chops, cold meats, porridge or cream of oatmeal, and bread and butter/marmalade. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were gaining in popularity over ale, beer, and wine. Eileen White identifies the period from 1860 to 1914 as the "flowering of the Victorian breakfast." The first edition of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in 1861, had only a short section on breakfast that was essentially the same as the food described above. Future editions showcased the developing nature of the meal, adding new recipes, illustrations, and sub-sections as time went on. The Breakfast Book (1865), by Georgiana Hill, was entirely devoted to breakfast, and in addition to the staples above included among its recipes pickled pork, game or poultry, curries and devilled bones, beefstakes, mutton chops, veal cutlets, pies, croquettes, ham toast, savoury puddings, galantines and meat in jelly, and collared and potted meat. Although she described a wide variety of offerings, Hill did discourage certain dishes, such as black puddings. The Breakfast Book provides the following breakfast for the "Spring Quarter":

As seen above, authors of cookbooks like Mrs. Beeton's and The Breakfast Book presented a wide variety of dishes, but White notes that they had to exhort their readership to choose more than the standard meal of bacon and eggs. Even bacon and eggs could be too expensive for some households, and so often breakfast would be rehashed leftovers with some new sauce or gravy added. As such, White notes that wide spreads of eclectic meats and other tidbits would not be likely to be found on most Victorian breakfast tables. After all, most Victorians were not inhabitants of country houses. At the end of the Victorian period, B. Seebohm Rowntree published Poverty: A Study of Town Life, studying three classes of individuals: those with earnings below 26 shillings, those with earnings above that, and the servant keeping class. For two lower class families bacon, eggs, bread, butter, coffee, cocoa, tea, cake, and the occasional sausage or ham made the breakfast roster. A servant class family added porridge, marmalade, and potted beef to their offerings. At the peak of the social pyramid, the royal family ate eggs, bacon, fish, culets, chops or steak, roast chicken/fowl, and basic accessories (though the Queen was rumoured to only eat a single boiled egg for breakfast by the end of her life).

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