Full breakfast

• 1. Introduction

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  The full breakfast, also known as the fry-up, is a substantial cooked meal made across Great Britain and Ireland. Depending on the kitchen, it may be called a full English, full Scottish, full Welsh, full Irish or Ulster fry.

  The meal's history contains a puzzle. One description is blunt: "large cooked breakfasts do not figure in English life and letters until the 19th century, when they appeared with dramatic suddenness".

  Why did a plate of fried food arrive so abruptly, and why did it stay? Who decided what belongs on it? And why do people in some regions treat a single ingredient as a matter of honour?

  The answers run through porridge bowls, mining communities, a cookbook best-seller and a very serious argument about beans.

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• 2. Before The Fry-Up

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  Porridge, pottage and bread with jam or marmalade filled the early modern breakfast table across the British Isles. Oatmeal in several forms was a common way to start the day.

  Eggs and bacon began to appear at breakfast in the seventeenth century. They were not the only meats on the table at that time, and other cuts shared the morning meal with them.

  Tea's spread as a morning drink went hand in hand with breakfast becoming a popular meal in its own right.

  The aristocracy took the meal furthest. Their breakfasts were lavish, centred on local meats and fish from their own country estates.

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• 3. Victorian Boom

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  Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in 1861, lists a breakfast of fried ham and eggs. The phrase full breakfast does not appear in it, yet the book was a best-seller.

  Cookbooks like Beeton's helped fix the ingredients of the meal during the Victorian era. The result was a pared-down version of the upper-class country breakfast.

  It cost little enough for the emerging middle classes. It could also be prepared and eaten quickly before a day's work.

  The full breakfast reached its peak of popularity in Edwardian Britain. Food shortages during the Second World War then brought a decline.

  New ways of storing and preparing food let the meal return. By the 1950s it had become a staple of the working class.

  Since those years the daily fry-up has slipped. Health worries are one reason, and the long preparation time compared with convenience-food breakfasts is another. The meal survives as an occasional, celebratory or traditional breakfast.

  Many cafés and pubs in Great Britain and Ireland now serve it at any hour of the day under the name all-day breakfast.

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• 4. The English Plate

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  A 2017 poll by YouGov asked people to build an ideal Full English. More than half chose bacon, sausage, beans, bread, eggs, hash browns, mushrooms and tomatoes.

  Black pudding came last among the traditional items, chosen 35 percent of the time. Another 26 percent of people added chips or sautéed potatoes.

  No fixed menu exists, but a common traditional plate has back bacon and sausages, usually pork. Eggs may be fried, poached or scrambled, and the tomatoes and mushrooms are fried or grilled.

  Beans can be piled onto the toast to make beans on toast. Buttered toast with jam or marmalade often arrives at the end of the meal.

  Its high share of cereal, plus herbs such as pennyroyal, sets it apart from other blood sausages.

  Bubble and squeak is a traditional side of cooked potatoes and cabbage, mixed together and fried. The Oxford English Dictionary says its name alludes to the sounds the ingredients make in the pan. Hash browns now often take its place.

  Because nearly everything is fried, the English version is commonly called a fry-up. In the UK it is sometimes called a Full Monty.

  One theory traces that name to General Bernard Montgomery, nicknamed Monty. He was said to have begun every day with a full English breakfast while on campaign in North Africa during the Second World War.

  Vegetarian and vegan plates are available in cafés and restaurants. Meat-free sausages and bacon stand in for the originals, with scrambled tofu or egg substitutes, and mushrooms and tomatoes play a larger part.

  In 2012 the English Breakfast Society was founded in Hertfordshire as a learned society. Its mission is to research and document the breakfast and to publish authoritative reference material.

  It promotes the 2nd of December each year as English Breakfast Day. It also runs an annual English Breakfast World Championship, open to anyone, with entries sent by email or by direct message on social media.

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• 5. Scotland And Wales

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  Stornoway black pudding comes from the Western Isles of Scotland, where it is known as marag-dhubh. It is one of several local elements that mark the full Scottish breakfast.

  Lorne sausage, also called square sausage or slice sausage, is made from minced meat, rusk and spices. No casing holds it together, so it is cut into square slices from a formed block.

  Ayrshire middle bacon sits beside it, along with the tattie scone. A tattie scone is a savoury griddle scone made with mashed potato and a small amount of plain flour.

  Occasionally the Scottish plate also includes haggis, white pudding, fruit pudding or oatcakes. Menus often offer it as an all-day dish.

  Early editions of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable described a Scotch breakfast as "a substantial breakfast of sundry sorts of good things to eat and drink".

  In Wales, two ingredients set the full breakfast apart: cockles and laverbread. The common cockle, Cerastoderma edule, is an edible saltwater clam found in waters from Iceland south to Senegal.

  Laverbread is a purée of laver, an edible seaweed eaten mainly in Wales. It is often mixed with oatmeal and fried.

  Fried laver with cockles and bacon was the traditional breakfast of mine workers in the South Wales Coalfield. Welsh sausages, mushrooms and eggs might join them.

  In modern Welsh breakfasts, smoked fish may stand in for the black pudding.

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• 6. Breakfast Across Ireland

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  In Connacht, Leinster and Munster, brown soda bread, fried potato farls, white pudding and boxty often fill the plate beside the bacon and eggs.

  Soda bread is a quick bread that uses sodium bicarbonate rather than yeast to rise. Its basic ingredients are flour, sodium bicarbonate, salt and buttermilk, and versions of it appear all over Ireland, north and south.

  Farl is an old word meaning fourth or quarter. A potato farl is a flatbread in which potato replaces part of the wheat flour.

  The dough is traditionally rolled into a flat circle, cut into quarters and baked. Rice or chickpea flour can replace the wheat for a gluten-free version.

  White pudding is a British Isles meat dish broadly similar to black pudding, but without blood. Modern recipes use suet or fat, oatmeal or barley, breadcrumbs and sometimes pork and pork liver, packed into a natural or cellulose casing.

  Boxty, which also goes by the names bacstaí and steaimpí, is a traditional Irish potato pancake.

  The breakfast roll puts elements of the full Irish breakfast inside a French roll. It has become popular because it is easy to eat on the way to school or work, and petrol stations and corner shops across Ireland sell it.

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• 7. The Ulster Fry

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  In Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, the Ulster fry once topped a poll to find the province's favourite dish. People eat it throughout the day, not only at breakfast.

  Traditionally it includes soda farls and potato bread. An Ulster variant of the Scotch pancake is a frequent addition, and it is handy for soaking up egg yolk.

  Soda farls are made from soda bread. Their place in the Ulster fry has earned them near-legendary status, and bakeries, shops and supermarkets everywhere sell them.

  Potato bread is a dense flatbread made from cooked potatoes, flour, baking powder and buttermilk. In an Ulster fry it often arrives as potato farls.

  Reliable sources describe the Ulster fry as coming from Northern Ireland. Yet three of the nine Ulster counties, Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan, lie in the Republic of Ireland.

  In 2021 the travel journalist Jim Murty wrote on his blog that he ate Ulster fry as a youth in Donegal. He added that he still did so in Monaghan, "when on best behaviour", and in Belfast.

  In 2024 a business in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, beat four other finalists for the title of Best Ulster Fry in the county. The winner went on to the final of the Ulster Fry World Championships.

  That contest accepts entries from all nine Ulster counties, plus one extra entry from Belfast. First held in 2023, it is part of the annual Donaghadee Summer Festival in County Down, Northern Ireland.

  The organisers specify five ingredients: bacon, eggs, sausage, soda bread and potato bread. "To make things fair,..." they have stated, nothing else is allowed, including avocado, black or white pudding and French toast.

  Traditionalists apply a stricter test. Only ingredients that can be fried in lard, the fat from domestic pigs, belong in the dish.

  They therefore rule out baked beans and consider hash browns an abomination, even though beans, at least, are increasingly popular on the plate.

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• 8. Beyond The Isles

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  Australia has its own version of the full breakfast. It is sometimes called a full Australian breakfast, a big fry or a big fry-up, and more often a Big Breakfast or big brekkie.

  The Australian version has been described as a quintessential Aussie dish. Big breakfasts feature on the menus of most Australian cafés, from the four biggest state capitals to regional roadhouses, which are truck stops.

  The full breakfast is also popular in many Commonwealth nations. It ranks among the most internationally recognised British dishes, alongside bangers and mash, toad in the hole, shepherd's pie, fish and chips, roast beef, Sunday roast, cream tea and the Christmas dinner.

  The United States shares a similar but modified tradition, with no commonly agreed name. Large, heavy breakfasts there are sometimes called the Lumberjack, the Traditional American or the Farmers Breakfast.

  They swap several key ingredients for heavy savoury items and sweet carbohydrates, rather than the strictly savoury profile of a UK or Irish plate.

  Typical components are eggs to order, bacon or sausage, and potatoes as hash browns or home fries, which are diced potatoes pan-fried with onions. Pancakes, a waffle or French toast complete the plate.

  In the southern United States, biscuits with white sausage gravy often take the place of all that.

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