Healthy Breakfast

By Albert Jack

From the bestselling author of Red Herrings & White Elephants, Shaggy Dogs, Pop Goes the Weasel, What Caesar did for My Salad and many more....

Food is just as entitled to a proper history as castles, wars, kings, queens, art, literature and the bubonic plague. But the book world is now so saturated by celebrity chefs trying to show the working man how to rub garlic on a ciabatta or break lime leaves over a piece of raw fish that we’ve lost sight of the really interesting stories behind the recipes we all know and love.

And, whilst I don’t ride around London on a scooter with my mates or swear at incompetent sous chefs for a living, nor do I know one end of a pork loin from its elbow, I do love history and I do love food.

And the history behind our favourite dishes is fascinating, surprising and overlooked – from the Buddha’s obsession with porridge to the dying playwright Moliere dosing himself with Parmesan rather than medicine (it didn’t work) and I wanted to find out more.

And in this volume I take a close look at the history and origins of the most important meal of the day, breakfast. Just what is a Full English and why is it English? What were the medicinal origins of cereal and who was the Benedict who loved his morning eggs so much.

Find out all of that and much more in Healthy Breakfast.....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Albert Jack Publishing
• Release date: Feb 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386730330

Book preview

Albert Jack

Albert Jack Publishing

Copyright Page

Healthy Breakfast

Food History: The History of our Favorite Breakfast

(2018 eBook Edition)

Extract from What Caesar did for My Salad (2010)

Copyright ©December 2015 Albert Jack (First Published in 2010)

Cover Art: Albert Jack Publishing

Cover Design: Albert Jack Publishing

All rights are reserved to the author. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This is a work of non-fiction

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Introduction to What Caesar did for My Salad

Food is just as entitled to a proper history as castles, wars, kings, queens, art, literature and the bubonic plague. But the book world is now so saturated by celebrity chefs trying to show the working man how to rub garlic on a ciabatta or break lime leaves over a piece of raw fish that we’ve lost sight of the really interesting stories behind the recipes we all know and love.

And, whilst I don’t ride around London on a scooter with my mates or swear at incompetent sous chefs for a living, nor do I know one end of a pork loin from its elbow, I do love history and I do love food.

And the history behind our favourite dishes is fascinating, surprising and overlooked – from the Buddha’s obsession with porridge to the dying playwright Moliere dosing himself with Parmesan rather than medicine (it didn’t work) and I wanted to find out more.

In The Life of Brian they ask ‘what did the Romans ever do for us?’ Well, one unexpected answer I discovered in my research is that amongst many other things they invented fast food. Or that the curries of India turn out to be the very tasty result of centuries of wars, invasions and trading missions.

The biryani came from the Persians, vindaloo from the Portuguese, mulligatawny soup from the stiff-upper-lipped Brits who insisted on still having a hot soup course in the subcontinent’s sweltering heat – to name but three.

Moving back to Europe, it’s amazing both to see how much food has changed and how it has stayed the same: the peasants of the Middle Ages lived just above the starvation line and scraped by on sludgy pease pottage but today’s modern day peasant, the penniless student’s equivalent culinary staple is the tastier but not dissimilar baked beans on toast or a fish finger sandwich.

But rather than just retelling the stories of how civilizations developed cooking techniques millennia ago, I wanted to know the stories about the people behind the food we eat everyday. Who was Marguerita, and why was the world’s most famous pizza named after her?

And while everybody loves crêpes Suzette but do they know that Suzette was the mistress of an earlier hard-living Prince of Wales and how the dish was named after her? And what about the notorious earl of Sandwich and how he came up with our favourite snack to