During a time that found Betty Friedan equating cooking with the systemic oppression of women , the morning meal forced a question: Could women both win bread and toast it? Breakfast presented a similar challenge for men: In the s and s, Anderson notes , amid the anxieties about traditional gender roles that the post-war climate brought about, cookbooks aimed at men emerged in the marketplace. Even baked goods got masculine-ized : Brick Gordon, in , recommended that male cooks might, if baking biscuits, eschew ladylike rolling pins for … beer bottles.
Today, those anxieties live on, in their way: Breakfast remains fraught, politically and otherwise. The current debates, though, tend to address not gender roles, but rather considerations of health—for the individual consumer, for the culture in which they participate, and for the planet. And so is another unique feature of contemporary life: the internet argument. It was preceded by thousands of other pieces that are all, in some way, engaging with profound questions about the most basic meal of the day.
One of them was from The Times itself. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. The idea that breakfast could do you good was no longer considered to apply solely to the sick and old.
Indeed, in some quarters, people began to think that the old did not need breakfast at all. Eating breakfast was not quite ubiquitous by At Grimsthorpe Castle, two meals per day was still the rule in , with only a few exceptions. Similarly, the household ordinances of Francis Willoughby died , the builder of Wollaton Hall, do not consistently mention breakfasts.
So, why the change? As the above has shown, the shift to eating breakfast was not quite as sudden as previously thought. Prior to several sorts of common people did eat a breakfast of sorts. However, there clearly was a degree of change in the 16th century: it became the norm, not the exception. Some writers have attributed this to the Reformation. Some to the greater availability of food. Something more profound was happening.
The answer is probably to be found in changing patterns of employment. In the earlier Middle Ages, the majority of people organised their own time. Only in summer, with haymaking and hay-carting responsibilities to fulfil, did the breakfast become a necessity, because of the long hours in the fields. It was the same for travellers setting off on long journeys: the early start made breakfast a necessity. It was such a long time until dinner at 11am that they needed the sustenance to keep them going.
Young monks clearly ate breakfast for the same reason. What happened in the 16th century was that men increasingly started working for other people, employed for a prescribed set of hours each day.
The long hours that employees could be expected to work can be seen in a statute of which declared that, between mid-March and mid-September, the working day of craftsmen and labourers should begin at 5am and continue to 7 or 8pm with only an hour and a half for dinner.
The consequences are obvious: if a labourer cannot have his supper until 7 or 8pm, he is going to get hungry if he has his dinner at the traditional medieval time of As mentioned above, Thomas Elyot recommended that dinner and supper be no more than six hours apart.
Thomas Cogan echoed this in his treatise. Thus the old medieval dinner time was pushed back to the later time of luncheon. Delaying lunch had a knock-on effect on the start of the day. As the time of dinner was pushed back to luncheon, at 12 or 1pm, people needed a solid breakfast to keep them going. As for the gap between breakfast and dinner, Elyot, Cogan and Vaughan all agreed that this should be no more than four hours.
Such a shift, based around employment, was thus primarily an urban phenomenon, or one of workers in towns, and areas providing the towns. The merchants dine and sup seldom before 12 at noon, and six at night, especially in London. It is bound up with, and indicative of, our emergence as a people who worked for a living rather than lived off the land. Dr Ian Mortimer is the author of 10 books and many articles on English history, and writes fiction under the name James Forrester.
Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Home Period Tudor How the Tudors invented breakfast. What they got was cereal. Before cereal represented our over-sugared, overprocessed relationship with food, Americans viewed cereal as a health food. Its origins lie in health sanitariums run in the mid to late s by some familiar names—like Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. It was a reform period when doctors were still often called quacks: Germ theory was just gaining prominence, and Dr.
They believed that too much meat and too many spices had negative effects, and they preferred whole grains to white breads. A dietary reformer named Sylvester Graham invented the graham cracker in And James Kellogg developed granola or corn flakes in the s. The original versions were spartan affairs. But people wanted them. It was a full on craze. The most successful food trends tend to combine science and morality, and the invention of cereal was no exception.
He described the modern diet as unnatural and too diverse. Except his answer was cereal. But Dr. Kellogg believed that eating biologically would solve much more than dyspepsia and indigestion. Like Dr. In his mind, masturbation was a shameful act linked to bad health; and over-stimulating diets, diseases, and sexual acts formed an insidious cycle.
Eating cereal would keep Americans from masturbating and desiring sex. John Harvey Kellogg was a true believer. During his lectures, he explained how people could make their own cereal at home. Kellogg felt particularly bitter about the development: the two most successful cereal entrepreneurs were his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, and one of his former patients, C. Post, who Dr. Kellogg accused of stealing the corn flake recipe from his safe. Both of them became wildly successful thanks to two key ingredients: sugar and advertising.
By the s, Post Cereals fully coated its cereals with sugar. The Kellogg brothers had long argued over adding sugar—Dr. Still, cereal kept its health food reputation thanks to a constant barrage of advertising.
Cereal manufacturers like C. Post claimed that cereal cured everything up to malaria and appendicitis. To appeal to children, cereal companies pioneered the use of cartoon mascots.
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