Breakfast
Full breakfast
A full breakfast is a substantial cooked breakfast meal, often served in Great Britain and Ireland. The typical ingredients are bacon, sausages, eggs, black pudding, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms and fried bread with toast and a beverage such as coffee or tea served on the side. Hash browns are a common contemporary but non-traditional inclusion. Ingredients may extend beyond these or include regional variants, which may often be referred to by different names depending on the area. While it is colloquially known as a "fry-up" in most areas of the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is usually referred to as a "full English" , a "full Irish", "full Scottish", "full Welsh", and "Ulster fry", in England, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, respectively.
Many of the ingredients of a full breakfast have long histories, but "large cooked breakfasts do not figure in English life and letters until the 19th century, when they appeared with dramatic suddenness". Across the British Isles and Ireland, early modern breakfasts were often breads served with jams or marmalades, or else forms of oatmeal, porridge or pottage. Eggs and bacon started to appear in breakfasts in the seventeenth century, but they were not the only meats consumed in breakfasts at that time. The rising popularity of breakfast was closely tied to the rise of tea as a popular morning drink. Of note were the lavish breakfasts of the aristocracy, which would centre on local meats and fish from their country estates.
