On Saturday, we dropped by Bee's in Sri Petaling for some brunch prior to a meeting and I had the English Breakfast. Now, what I think about this meal? Not too bad, the ham and the sausage is abit dry, other than that, it's just a typical Malaysian style English Breakfast.
Now, the reason for this post is to ask... Why is this dish called the English Breakfast? Why not something else? As usual, I turn my search to the one place that I know would churn out such facts, Wikipedia! Here's a quick background on this dish.
A cooked breakfast of this sort is a relatively modern invention; it developed in the houses of successful farmers or landowners during the late nineteenth century. For the more well-to-do, an array of breakfast dishes would be laid out buffet style in much the same way as hotels do today. Up until this period, fresh meat was generally considered a luxury except for the most affluent. The emergence of town grocers in the 1880s allowed people to exchange surplus eggs, etc., for other food items to diversify their diets. Only with the relative increase in the wealth of the general populace in the 20th century was the consumption of the full breakfast meal commonplace amongst the working classes.
E. Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, published in 1898, describes a full breakfast, calling it a Scotch breakfast. He describes it as "a substantial breakfast of sundry sorts of good things to eat and drink." Set six years later in Dublin of 1904, the opening of Ulysses by James Joyce contains a famous breakfast scene in which Leopold Bloom prepares and eats a fried pork kidney with bread and tea.
The meal was popularized in the United States by Edward Bernays during the 1920s and 1930s. In order to promote sales of bacon, he conducted a survey of physicians and reported their recommendation that people eat hearty breakfasts. He sent the results of the survey to 5,000 physicians, along with publicity touting bacon and eggs as a hearty breakfast. More recently, many doctors and health organizations have come to believe that diets high in saturated fats and cholesterol, such as bacon and eggs, are unhealthy and contribute to heart disease.
Well, there we have it, the origin of the English Breakfast. Other than that, we had a glass of Coke and a bottle of Jasmine Tea but that's nothing to shout about, Stephanie also had this nice looking Egg Role. Quite nice but I only had a bite and can't comment much about it.
