What Popular Breakfast Foods Looked Like When People First Started Eating Them

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 boasts a more complex history than you might imagine. The most eye-catching origin story for the role with a whole 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 Calvary charge to free the city. To commemorate the historic moment, a Viennese Baker started making bread shaped like stirrups, also known as Boy Goal in. 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 obvarnazak that can be traced back to the late 1300s, and the name for these circular seed sprinkled breads literally translates to parboiled. According to 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 smear or locks you can trust, the best bagel bakeries of medieval Europe were probably recognizable to modern eaters. 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 18, 98 is the probable beginning of fall, when the governor of Indochina, Paul Dumer, ordered the construction of Indochina's largest silk plant at Nam Din, South of Hanoi. Eventually, Nam Din 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 fall was born. It seems like the bulls may have originally been smaller, more of a snack size than the bathtub as we often see today. Originally fuss sellers would be roadside carrying pots of a 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 lbs of raw rice in a battery of 820 inch cylinders. The pressure built beyond the critical point and clouds of fluffy puffed rice flew into the awaiting 40 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 next year, Saul 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 Jalmuri, also known as Belpuri, 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 sugar, but rather Chinese 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 kick started the Alpine nation's reputation as a health tourism destination. 30 years later, Doctor Maximilian Oscar Bircher Benner was running his own Vital Force Sanatorium in the beautiful hills overlooking Lake. 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 created 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 and amused bouche of apple puree 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's pan Purdue, the Brit, says eggy bread comes from what might be the oldest cookbook in the world, according to Tasting Table de Ray, Coquinaria is usually associated with the famous Roman foodie Marcus Gavias Apecius, 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 a PC assist home 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 anytime traveling foodies with a crusted verse kid to appease could probably find some comforting and sweet custardy fried bread by asking around the markets. But remember to call it pond dulcis because France won't be invented for another few centuries yet. British people's obsession with breakfast states from the Dark ages, and like a lot of things in English society, it began at the tables of the rolling 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 lava cakes 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 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 US kitchens had a single cup coffee maker in 2020. Hey dude, please don't even talk to me until I have my coffee, OK? Oh hey Jeff, sorry I haven't had my coffee yet. 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 Calde, an Ethiopian goat herder. Calde's goat 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 the 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 gala 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 widely 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 birth place 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. Libya An Israeli restorator, Bino Gabso, took over his dad's Jaffa restaurant in the early 1990s and renamed it Doctor 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 Doctor Shakshuka was the dishes takeoff, then Otolenghi was the moment Shakshuka reached orbit. The best selling cookbook Jerusalem brought Shakshuka into the homes of 1,000,000. As to how the original version looked, it probably wasn't read. The term Shakshuka seems to 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 and 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 Croc 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. Croc 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 three-year process of getting McDonald's restaurants across the nation ready to serve breakfast. It paid off and by 1981 breakfast was 18% of McDonald's business. This is how Croc described the sandwich he ate that day, the original Egg Mcmuffin, an egg that had been formed in a one 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.