Author(s): Andrew Dalby

Culinary Theory

'To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day' wrote William Somerset Maugham, but what exactly is breakfast? It varies greatly from family to family and region to region, even though individuals tend to eat the same thing every day. While we love our traditional bacon and eggs, the Japanese eat rice and miso soup, and New Zealanders enjoy porridge. Yet we don't know how breakfast came to be. Taking a multifaceted approach to the story of the morning meal, The Breakfast Book collects narratives of breakfast in an attempt to pin down the mottled history of eating in the am. In search of what people have thought and written - and tasted - about breakfast, Andrew Dalby traces the meal's origins back to the Neolithic revolution. He follows the trail of toast crumbs from the ancient Near East and classical Greece to modern Europe and across the globe, rediscovering stories of breakfast in 3,000 years of fiction, memoirs and art.
Using a multitude of entertaining breakfast facts, anecdotes and images, he reveals why breakfast is so often the backdrop for unexpected meetings, why so many people eat breakfast out, and why this often silent meal is also so reassuring. Featuring a selection of historic and contemporary breakfast recipes from around the world, The Breakfast Book is the first book to explore the history of this inimitable meal and will make an ideal morning companion to crumpets, croissants and kidneys alike.