Did over-caffeinated goats really bring coffee into the modern world? How did
Queen Victoria help popularize muesli? Your favorite breakfast foods went on quite a
journey through history before hitting your plate in the form they take today.
Like pizza, halal carts, and the Statue of Liberty,
bagels may have become iconic in NYC, but boast a more complex history than you might imagine.
The most eye-catching origin story for the roll-with-a-hole comes from Austria
in the 1680s. The King of Poland had just saved Vienna from two months of siege,
personally leading over 18,000 horse warriors in the largest-ever known
cavalry charge to free the city. To commemorate the historic moment,
a Viennese baker started making bread shaped like stirrups — also known as "beugel" in German.
However, it seems the bagel predates this tale. According to NPR, the thing that makes a bagel
a bagel is boiling water — not necessarily New York City water, either! This is the step that
creates the crucial textural elements of a bagel. There is a Polish bread called
"obwarnazek" that can be traced back to the late 1300s, and the name for these circular,
seed-sprinkled breads literally translates to "par-boiled." According The Atlantic,
the boiling before baking method might have been added as a technicality to
avoid restrictions on Christians eating bread made by Jewish bakers.
While you might struggle to find a schmear or lox you can trust,
the best bagel bakeries of medieval Europe were probably recognizable to modern eaters.
"A good bowl of pho will always make me happy. Take me to that
special place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts."
While Vietnam has a well-deserved reputation as a tropical vacation destination,
winters in the North can get nippy. Especially in the mornings, before the sun can burn off
the cloud cover. Pho is the perfect breakfast for a foggy winter's morning — savory, meaty,
and filling — much like a lot of the more indulgent breakfast options we all
find ourselves craving when the days get shorter, but with none of the heaviness.
According to the BBC, 1898 is the probable beginning of pho, when the governor of Indochina,
Paul Doumer, ordered the construction of Indochina's largest silk plant at
Nam Dinh , south of Hanoi. Eventually, Nam Dinh became a boomtown. Workers flooded in, including
a lot of French builders with a taste for beef. Local soup sellers transitioned from river crabs
and water buffalo to beef and especially beef bones — now available for free from overwhelmed
butchers — and so pho was born. It seems like the bowls may have originally been smaller, more of a
snack size than the bathtubs we often see today. Originally pho sellers would be roadside, carrying
pots of pho heating on stoves on shoulder poles — another reason to stick to the cool morning hours.
Puffed Rice arrived in America with a snap, crackle, and bang. It was the 1904 World's Fair,
and Professor Alexander P. Anderson was heating 48 pounds of raw rice in a
battery of eight twenty-inch cylinders. The pressure built beyond the critical point,
and clouds of fluffy puffed rice flew into the awaiting forty-foot-wide receptacle. The professor
and his assistants sold the new explosive rice just like popcorn to the tune of over 250,000
bags by the end of the fair. Anderson was already working for the Quaker Oats Company,
and so the very next year saw Puffed Rice hit the shelves as a brand-new cereal.
However, puffed rice has been a staple of food in India for centuries. You can find
it on the city streets mixed with spices, chutneys, nuts,
and other textural delights in jhal muri, also known as bhel puri, depending on where you are.
Eating puffed rice with mutton curry — known as mudhi mansa , referred to as the
breakfast of warriors — has associations going back as far as Emperor Ashoka the
Great of the 2nd Century. So it seems that the original bowls of breakfast puffed rice
weren't served with milk or sugar, but rather chutneys, curries, mustard oil, and spices.
In the 1860s, a heartbroken Queen Victoria needed a break in order to recover fully from
the death of her beloved Prince Albert. She took a five-week holiday in the Switzerland mountains,
and once tales of her returning to London a new woman spread around Europe,
she kickstarted the Alpine nation's reputation as a health tourism destination.
Thirty years later, Dr Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner was running his own "Vital Force"
sanatorium in the beautiful hills overlooking Lake Zurich. It was a resort where people would
undertake his program of treatments to cure their ailments. Dr. Bircher-Brenner's methods
focused on raw, whole foods, outdoor air, strict discipline, and exercise.
As part of the program, patients ate a bowl of muesli before every meal, rather than just for
breakfast. The focus back then was actually on the apple, which was grated and soaked in water
along with the oats and nuts — the original name for muesli was "Apple Diet Meal," and
muesli translates as "little mush." The earliest muesli-eaters would have seen themselves as eating
an amuse-bouche of apple purée with some added texture in the form of oats and nuts. It would not
be an unsweetened breakfast cereal with a little fruit added — though much like many modern muesli
enthusiasts, they were probably more motivated by medical, rather than culinary, concerns.
French toast is a chef's kind of comfort food - it's a classic for a reason. Unsurprisingly,
though, it isn't actually from France!
"That doesn't make sense."
The earliest mention of what we would call 'French Toast',
known to the french as "pain perdu," comes from what might be the oldest cookbook in the world,
according to Tasting Table. "De Re Coquinaria" is usually associated with the famous Roman foodie
Marcus Gavius Apicius, but it is likely he didn't write the recipes at all. Rather,
this nobleman's fame for hosting feasts that celebrated the finest dishes in the empire made
his name synonymous with extravagant cooking for centuries after he died.
According to the translation of the oldest copy of Apicius' tome that still exists,
cooks in ancient Rome would slice fine white bread with the crusts removed into thick pieces. These
crustless chunks are then soaked in milk and beaten eggs before being fried and drizzled
in honey. So any time-traveling foodies with a crust-averse kid to appease could probably find
some comforting and sweet custardy fried bread by asking around the markets — but remember to
call it "Pan Dulcis," because France won't be invented for another few centuries yet.
British people's obsession with breakfasts dates from the Dark Ages, and like a lot of
things in English society, it began at the tables of the ruling nobility. Nowadays,
there is a fixedness to the Full English — bacon, egg, sausage, baked beans, and toast,
minimum. Usually grilled mushrooms and/or tomato are on offer as the vegetable part of the dish.
Black pudding, a British blood sausage, is a common addition, often served with white
pudding in Ireland. Many Irish breakfasts will have three different sausage varieties,
as well as the highest potato potential. Full Scottish breakfasts have sausage, and sometimes
haggis, and if you eat breakfast in Wales you will encounter lavercakes — made from edible seaweed.
This standardization happened in the Edwardian era, when trains, tourism,
and industrialization made it easier for the middle classes to afford a big breakfast,
hotels set hospitality standards, and kitchens became more focused on efficiency.
The original tradition of the Full English was likely a hunting breakfast,
served by the staff of landed gentry to impress their guests. This extravagant feast had up to 24
dishes by the 1800s, which would show off the wealth of seasonal produce grown on their estates,
prepared by their servants in the local style. Fishes, fruits, meat pies, kidneys on toast,
and other dishes straight from the pages of "Game of Thrones" made up the original
Full English, but what hasn't changed is this breakfast's connection to national identity.
Coffee has become one of the world's great non-negotiables. Caffeine,
the stimulant that makes coffee psychoactive, is regularly consumed by around 90% of Americans.
The fact is those dark brown cups of Joe actually make us better,
smarter workers. Neurons fire quicker, dopamine starts flowing, and morning brain
fog lifts — no wonder 40% of U.S. kitchens had a single-cup coffee maker in 2020.
"Hey dude –" "Please, don't even talk to
me until I've had my coffee." "Ok."
"Oh, hey, Tim –" "Sorry, I haven't had my coffee yet.” [bark] “No."
The coffee plant from which we get the beans comes from the area around the Gulf of Aden,
where the bottom of the Arabian peninsula almost meets the Horn of Africa. The most
famous story is set around 800 CE and involves Kaldi, an Ethiopian goat herder. Kaldi's goats
started acting strange after eating the red berries from one of the mountain bushes,
and apparently he took the berries to local monks, who accidentally brewed the first cup of coffee.
Though this story is delightful, it was also probably invented centuries later. Evidence for
Ethiopian nomads preparing coffee beans goes back as far as 575 CE, but according to PBS,
the practice of intentionally roasting beans to create a drink we would recognize as coffee was
only commonplace after around 1300. The original way that the Galla people would
prepare their coffee seems to have been more like a protein-packed energy bar, sticking the
stimulating berries together with animal fat or ghee for a psychoactive pre-battle pick-me-up.
The hottest new brunch dish since eggs Benedict, shakshuka has gone
from culinary obscurity to menu mainstay in the last 30 years. As with any trend,
recipes vary wildly between restaurants, but most modern shakshuka dishes are variations on
the basic idea of cooking eggs in a spiced tomato, pepper, onion, and garlic sauce.
Many places in the Middle East and North Africa claim to be the birthplace of shakshuka — which
has whole baked eggs, rather than the scramble found in Turkish menemen — but the lineage of
the current shakshuka craze is direct. Libyan-Israeli restaurateur Bino Gabso
took over his dad's Jaffa restaurant in the early 1990s and renamed it Dr. Shakshuka. Before then,
the dish wasn't particularly popular in Israel outside of the Sephardic Jewish community that
brought it with them from North Africa. If Dr. Shakshuka was the dish's take-off, then
Ottolenghi was the moment shakshuka reached orbit — the bestselling cookbook "Jerusalem"
brought shakshuka into the homes of millions.
As to how the original version looked? It probably wasn't red. The term shakshuka seems to date back
further than the first tomatoes arriving from the Americas. Green shakshuka is available
on many menus, and is likely much closer to the original dish in looks, if not necessarily flavor.
Herb Peterson owned a McDonald's franchise in Santa Barbara, CA, and he had an idea. He
just had to figure out how to get Ray Kroc, then owner of McDonald's, to give it a try. Without
giving too much away, Peterson told Kroc he needed to come down to the store. Peterson
was worried that his idea to make a breakfast sandwich at a burger restaurant would seem too
crazy over the phone and decided that the proof of the McMuffin would have to be in the eating.
Kroc made that drive to southern California in 1972 where he had tasted the sandwich and been
given a 14-point presentation by Peterson. After they found a name for it - thanks to Patty Turner,
wife of the then-CEO of McDonald's - he started the 3-year process of
getting McDonald's restaurants across the nation ready to serve breakfast.
"Breakfast at McDonald's, get your day a great beginning - scrambled
eggs and sausage help a salesman make his sale"
It paid off, and by 1981, breakfast was 18% of McDonald's business. This is how
Kroc described the sandwich he ate that day, the original Egg McMuffin:
"An egg that had been formed in a Teflon circle, with the yolk broken,
and was dressed with a slice of cheese and a slice of grilled
Canadian bacon. This was served open-faced on a toasted and buttered English muffin."
In the 50 years since, the original McMuffin has barely changed from that formula,
though the introduction of the McMuffin changed a lot.