The best way I know to start a Sunday morning is a bacon egg and cheese. New York Times
restaurant critic Pete Wells said the humble sandwich was “ … designed to satisfy practical
needs rather than voluptuary desires …” but it seems to me that’s only half right. Confronted
with the classic trade-off—deliciousness or affordability—the bacon egg and cheese says “yes.”
People have been eating bacon, eggs, and cheese, individually or in some combination,
for centuries, but the famous breakfast sandwich that’s ubiquitous in New York City and other
parts of the American northeast is a surprisingly recent phenomenon.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and today on Food History we’re talking about the beloved bacon egg and
cheese, from the role Sigmund Freud’s nephew played in getting bacon on the
breakfast table to the science that gives us perfect, plastic cheese. Let’s get started.
During the industrial revolution in London, factory workers would sometimes stop at a
street vendor for a simple sandwich of eggs and sausage grease in a bap,
a type of soft roll that originated in Scotland. The meal must’ve functioned
something like a bacon egg and cheese does today: a quick, affordable—and portable—way
to start the day, often enjoyed alongside the consumer’s caffeinated beverage of
choice. Some of those egg sandwiches may have even included bacon and cheese.
Today in the UK, the preferred breakfast sandwich seems to be the bacon butty,
a simple offering with bacon and butter (though, interestingly, despite its name,
you can find partisans on the internet championing the butter-less bacon butty).
Butterless bacon butty. Butterless bacon butty and I’ve blacked out. The bacon butty is usually
accompanied by either “brown sauce” or ketchup. The standard British bacon, by the way, isn’t what
we’re used to getting here in the states: It’s a less fatty cut of pork that comes more from
the loin than the belly, closer to what we call Canadian bacon (the Brits call the stuff we eat
in the States “streaky bacon”). If you have strong opinions about the best kind of bacon,
you can leave a comment below OR! You can join Mental Floss’s new discord server. We
just launched it this week. We’ll source ideas for future videos there, release unique content,
and, if all goes according to plan, foster a community of quirky weirdos who love to learn.
There’s a link down below, or you can just visit discord.io/mentalfloss. The bacon butty
is known as being an antidote for a hangover, not unlike the bacon egg and cheese. But does
science support these common folk beliefs about the curative properties of grease? In a word,
no. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t based on a real physiological phenomenon. By the time you
wake up after a night of imbibing too much, “ … the alcohol has been digested and processed
by your body so there is nothing to ‘absorb,’” as registered dietitian Amy Shapiro told NBC
News. All the delicious carbs in the world won’t “soak up” the booze (you would’ve been better
off not drinking to excess, but hey—nobody’s perfect). Part of the reason you crave that
fatty meal is a neuropeptide called galanin. Galanin production increases after a night of
heavy drinking, so you might very well wake up with elevated levels of the brain chemical in
your system. And as University of North Carolina researcher William Gruchow told Popular Science,
“Galanin increases appetite for fats.” So even if the magical hangover-fixing abilities of a fatty
sandwich are exaggerated, galanin could contribute to the very real craving for one after an evening
of questionable decision-making. Though breakfast baps preceded the modern bacon egg and cheese,
it’s not so easy to say there’s a direct line linking the two, or that the British
offering was the first of its kind. There’s evidence for bread production from more than
14,000 years ago. It seems pretty safe to assume that someone ate an egg on bread at some point
before the industrial revolution, even if they didn’t think to market their creation. Today,
eggs on (or in) bread can be found in cuisines around the world, often alongside a pork product,
for breakfast or throughout the day. Israel’s sabich serves the eggs hard-boiled in a pita with
eggplant and other accompaniments; given its roots in the Iraqi Jewish community, it unsurprisingly
omits any form of pig. In France, you’ve got the croque madame, a ham and cheese sandwich topped
with an egg, often served with bechamel sauce. And one of the first popular breakfast sandwiches in
the United States may owe a debt to Chinese food. The legendary food writer James Beard posited
that the Denver sandwich—which, like its omelet sibling, features eggs, ham, bell peppers, onion,
and sometimes cheese—may have been the product of 19th-century Chinese rail workers trying to create
some version of egg foo young. Other writers feel the “Denver” may owe a debt to Basque immigrants,
who worked as miners and shepherds in the Nevada territory. They could have been inspired by
piperade, a dish of onions, peppers, and tomatoes that sometimes includes ham and eggs, as well.
Whatever the Denver sandwich’s provenance, it's easy to imagine the niche a convenient meal you
could hold with one hand might’ve filled out West, on long cattle drives or during days spent working
on the transcontinental railroad. So did that early American breakfast sammy lead us straight
to the bacon egg and cheese of today? It’s tough to say. The less-specific versions of the sandwich
are so generic that they’re difficult to track. In Heather Arndt Anderson’s Breakfast: A History, she
points to an 1897 cookbook for the “first recipe for a true breakfast sandwich.” For what it’s
worth, it calls for chopped meat, not bacon, and doesn’t include cheese. A 1926 publication from
the University of Minnesota on “Selection and Use of Bacon” includes a recipe for a bacon-egg club
sandwich served on buttered toast with mayo and tomatoes. Kinda similar…But a Google Books search
for “bacon egg and cheese,” specifically, doesn’t turn up anything relevant until 1990; “bacon egg
and cheese on a roll”—the proper full name for the New York sandwich, in my opinion—doesn’t show up
until the end of that decade. Bacon and eggs seem like prototypical breakfast fare today,
but that wasn’t always the case. And that’s not because bacon is anything new. People have been
curing pork belly with salt for thousands of years—the practice likely began in present-day
China, according to a 1975 paper by researchers from Armour and Company’s Food Division. People
have been raising domesticated pigs in that region for thousands of years. Adding salt to meat—or,
more commonly today, salts, including sodium nitrite—reduces “ … the amount of unbound water
available for microbial growth …” amongst other preserving processes, according to a 2010 analysis
from the United States Institute of Medicine. Pork has been in the Americas for about as long
as Europeans. Christopher Columbus brought eight little piggies with him to the Caribbean in 1493,
but Hernando de Soto is the explorer referred to as the “father of the American pork industry.” He
brought 13 pigs from Cuba to present-day Florida in 1539. They thrived; within three years,
that number had grown more than 50 times. Soon, pork products were an essential part of colonial
economies. Meat was for eating, of course, but lard could be used to cook, processed into
candles and soap, and even worked into therapeutic applications. Doctors do not generally recommend
eating an entire pig in one sitting (don’t bother asking, they just get weird about it). By hanging
cuts of meat over a smoldering fire for one to two weeks, people could preserve their pig,
long before refrigeration was a viable option. I don’t wanna blow anyone’s mind here, but smoky
bacon tastes pretty good. American colonists agreed. The appetite for bacon seemed especially strong in the
American south. After author and New Englander Emily Burke went down to Georgia in the 1840s,
she noted that “the people of the South would not think they could subsist without their
[swine] flesh; bacon, instead of bread, seems to be THEIR staff of life.” Much of that bacon,
of course, would’ve been processed by the skilled but unpaid labor of enslaved
people. For as much work as the butchery and curing of pork represented on plantations,
it also created a rare opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of indulgence. As Christopher Wilson
wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, a study of the Works Progress Administration’s slave narrative
project reveals that “ … hog killing time arises over and over as a joyous memory.” It would be a
gross misrepresentation, of course, to say that pork products like bacon could unite such an
unequal and divided country. But the appetite for those products, across racial lines, was certainly
strong. According to Sam Bowers Hilliard’s Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South,
1840-1860, “One estimate placed the per capita consumption of pork during the period at three
times that of Europe.” As the 19th century turned to the 20th, though, bacon sales waned. Large
breakfasts started to fall out of favor. As the country urbanized, fewer people felt the need (or
had the time) for a hearty morning meal. And as we discussed in a previous episode, breakfast cereals
started to gain popularity around that era, thanks in part to a guy who had a lot of thoughts about
masturbation. …Long story. Though bacon hadn’t, by any means, been exclusively a breakfast food,
these new eating habits helped put a dent in its sales. The Beech-Nut Packing Company wanted more
Americans to bring home the bacon, so, in the 1920s, they enlisted the help of Edward Bernays,
sometimes called the “father of public relations.” Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, honed in on
breakfast, thinking he could argue that a larger morning meal is better for health. Four out of
five doctors agreed. Actually, around 4500 out of 5000; Bernays had asked a physician to write
to thousands of his colleagues, and the great majority—according to Bernays, at least—co-signed
on the concept of a heavy breakfast as ‘scientifically desirable.’ Around the same time,
companies like Oscar Mayer found success in the U.S. market selling pre-sliced bacon, eventually
helping to cement its place as a worthy part of a complete breakfast. With the connection of bacon
and eggs established, it was only a matter of time before they’d find fame between bread. There’s not
much to say about the second ingredient on our sandwich. Our ancestors were probably eating
eggs before they were even Homo sapiens, with some estimates for hominid egg consumption going back
millions of years—long before anyone domesticated birds. An Ancient Roman cookbook has a recipe for
something like an omelet with honey (and, for the record, the egg portion of a bacon egg and
cheese is definitely a choose your own adventure kinda thing. You can specify scrambled or fried
or just let your grill cook choose for you). You can also request a specific kind of cheese,
but the standard-issue sandwich definitely comes with American. This, in my book, is the correct
choice. Because it’s made by blending cheese with emulsifying salts (amongst other things),
it has the ability “ … to melt without breaking or turning greasy the way a traditional cheese does,”
in the words of J. Kenji López-Alt. (A common choice for an emulsifying salt is sodium citrate,
by the way, which I got into back in our episode about nachos. By making the proteins in it more
soluble, sodium citrate helps create the perpetually melty nacho cheese common at
stadiums and school cafeterias.) Despite its name, the science behind American cheese was
developed by two men from Switzerland…and one from Canada…and, OK, maybe one in New York,
too. In the early 1900s, Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler used sodium citrate to repurpose excess
cheese scraps and preserve Switzerland’s beloved Emmental. Shortly after (whether he was building
on the Swiss process or working completely independently is a matter of some debate),
Canadian-born J.L. Kraft came up with what he called “warm cheese”—let’s talk to some folks
in marketing about that one, J.L. Kraft’s original process didn’t include emulsifying
salts—the first U.S. patent to include that element came from the aforementioned New Yorker,
George Herbert Garstin. But, as you might have guessed from Kraft’s last name,
his company ultimately made the biggest mark in the quasi-cheese game. Which raises the question:
to cheese or … na-cho …cheese. Is American cheese cheese? Kinda. Kraft singles were, for a time,
considered a “pasteurized process cheese food” by the FDA, which means they had to have at least
51% cheese content. (Kraft has since rebranded under the uncontrolled label of “pasteurized
prepared cheese product,” but the cheese content likely remains the same). The FDA also says that
‘process cheese foods’ (along with some related I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-quite-cheeses) have to
be formed into a “homogeneous plastic mass.” That doesn’t mean your Kraft singles are made from
petroleum, though; the FDA is using a different meaning of the adjective plastic,
like Merriam-Webster.com’s third entry for the word, “capable of being molded or modeled.” (On
that note: cheese-carving is absolutely a hobby you can pursue. In the estimation of
professional cheese carver Sarah Nep, it takes about 20 hours to create a cheese bust, if you
were curious—one of Nep’s pieces portrayed former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.) At this point,
we’ve discussed the history of bacon, eggs, and American cheese, but there’s one key missing
ingredient from our baconeggandcheese. Sure, you can get a breakfast sandwich on a bagel
or brioche, but when New Yorkers complain about not being able to find their favorite breakfast
item in other states, I think they’re really saying they can’t find the same kind of roll.
Called a hard roll or kaiser roll (the former name apparently came into fashion during World War I,
thanks to anti-German sentiment), it “ … has an almost cracker crisp crust on the outside and [is]
soft and chewy on the inside,” in the apt words of one ex-New Yorker on Reddit. These are not
bespoke artisanal creations. According to a piece by Sadie Stein in the New York Times, “Most rolls
sold at delis and coffee carts come from a few large distributors ….” Large, in this case, does
not mean bad. The kaiser roll actually comes from a proud lineage of high-quality industrial baking.
At 1876’s Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, one of the attractions was Louis Fleischmann’s
Vienna Model Bakery, which featured, amongst other award-winning offerings, consistently
tasty kaiser rolls. Fleischmann soon found success with bakeries throughout the northeast. He’s also,
incidentally, credited with pioneering the practice known as the bread line—his bakeries
would pass out simple sustenance to residents in need. There are a number of stories for how
the kaiser roll got its name, all related to its German meaning: emperor, in English. That could
be because the design on top of the roll looks like a crown; it could be an homage to the man
sometimes called the most beloved leader of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Joseph I; others
say it’s a nod to Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and supposedly has something to do with the royal
deregulation of roll prices. I have no idea which is correct, but I will point out one weird fact:
Louis Fleischmann, who helped popularize kaiser rolls in the United States, actually received
two medals from Kaiser Franz Joseph I for his bravery in the Austro-Prussian war. He
was apparently shot off his horse twice in one battle. It’s true: Fleischmann was, for a time,
in trouble. The kaiser roll (with or without poppy or sesame seeds) proved popular in New York’s
Jewish community and beyond. It provides a perfect textural backdrop for a bacon egg and cheese. It’s
not too bready, but it has the heft to stand up to the other ingredients. It adds an extra
level of crunch and will survive if you eat it on the street, as mother nature intended. There’s
surprisingly little out there about how this exact combination of ingredients came to be viewed as
its own defined dish and spread throughout bodegas and delis. Sometime in the second half of the 20th
century, it seems to have proliferated at truck stops, diners, and food carts—places where people
wanted to get something tasty and fast. And fast food, itself, might’ve helped popularize
the concept of a grab-and-go breakfast sandwich. In the early ‘70s, Jack in the Box locations had
started operating 24 hours a day. They eventually came up with the Breakfast Jack—ham, fried egg,
and American cheese on a hamburger bun. Around the same time, in what we can generously assume
was a coincidence, a Californian McDonald’s operator decided to create a breakfast version
of the eggs Benedict. It became known as the Egg McMuffin. The bacon egg and cheese, as I know it,
isn’t as conformist as a McMuffin—there are certainly no Teflon rings involved to shape a
perfectly circular egg. But I defy you to watch a grill cook prep a half dozen sandwiches in
4 minutes or less and tell me you ever need to get food in your hands faster. Sometimes,
food is about luxuriating in the moment, slowing down to enjoy a hot bowl of soup in winter or
a dozen cold oysters on a sunny afternoon. Other times, especially in a busy metropolis
with a debatable mass-addiction to work (what other city would brag about never sleeping?),
food is about the most efficient method of getting nutrients into your body. And sometimes,
when the right dish comes along, it’s about both. There’s an old expression you might hear in fields
as diverse as plumbing and filmmaking: “You can have it fast, you can have it good, you can have
it cheap: pick two.” But, thanks to the bacon egg and cheese, when breakfast rolls around,
as long as you’ve got a five-dollar bill and a deli within walking distance, you can pick all
three. Thanks for watching Food History. Let us know in the comment below your favorite breakfast
sandwich and I will ruthlessly judge them. Just kidding. Or am I? I’ll see you next time.