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Private Notes
Clarissa Dickson Wright's latest culinary adventure reveals the origins and development of our three daily meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner. As a nation, we take them for granted, assuming that they have always existed as they are now. But unpick each of these eating rituals, trace their lineage back through a thousand years of British history and you find fascinating and surprising stories of social upheaval and shifting class structures, of technological developments and gastronomic revolutions.
The origins of breakfast are the most mysterious of all. We all understand what we mean by a 'proper breakfast', but the particulars of our first meal of the day have changed dramatically over the centuries. From the earliest records of choirboys at St Paul's breaking their night's fast with bread and ale, through the heavily-laden morning tables of Jane Austen's era and the Edwardian age to today's mass-produced packet cereals, our breakfasts have been profoundly influenced by religious strictures, ideas of social status and, of course, the opinions of those self-appointed experts who claim to know what is best for us.
Some of our historic breakfast specialities, like plover's eggs in aspic, deep fried Dover sole or, Edward VII's favourite, a hollowed-out onion filled with chicken livers, cream and brandy, are now long-forgotten. Other present-day staples were accidental inventions. The combination of bacon and eggs came into being as an unintended consequence of the medieval Church's rules on fasting during Lent. Centuries later, Dr Kellogg discovered the secret to making cornflakes only after he mistakenly left his recipe to go mouldy - and Clarissa joins in on a recreation of the original experiment that produced the very first breakfast flake.
As she charts the evolution of our morning meal across the centuries and the origins of our best-known breakfast ingredients, Clarissa uncovers a story of lost traditions, culinary discoveries and extraordinary exces
In the second part of her latest culinary adventure, Clarissa Dickson Wright investigates the history of lunch, a meal that we now eat in a speedy average of 12.49 minutes. But 300 years ago lunch didn't exist at all - for centuries our daytime meal was called, as it still is in some parts of the country, dinner, a long-standing confusion that Clarissa attempts to unravel.
Lunch is the workhorse meal of the day and the story of its origins and evolution is really a history of our working lives across the centuries. Medieval farm labourers used to sit down to eat as early as 10am, but they had been toiling in the fields since daybreak. As she tucks into some of the dishes of the day, Clarissa explodes some common myths about our ancestors and their eating habits. Not all their fish was salted and people didn't eat rotten meat flavoured with spices, but they certainly did eat vegetables - and, back then, carrots were purple.
Moving forward through history, Clarissa tries a 17th-century recipe for venison that was a favourite of the diarist Samuel Pepys and discovers that the long business lunch of the 1980s already existed in the 1660s. By Victorian times, office workers were sitting down to steaming hot plates of mutton chops and oxtail stew in a chophouse, and Clarissa calls in to one of the last surviving examples in the City of London.
However, it is the Earl of Sandwich's famous convenience food invention from the 1750s that has come to dominate our modern lunchtime menu. All the same, the ubiquitous sandwich can still be an opportunity for creativity and inventiveness, and as she comes towards the end of her journey through history, Clarissa meets Britain's most celebrated sandwich designer and samples his most stunning original creation, which has been officially declared to be the world's greatest sandwich.
Clarissa Dickson Wright's latest culinary adventure reveals the origins and development of our three daily meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner. As a nation, we take them for granted, assuming that they have always existed as they are now. But unpick each of these eating rituals, trace their lineage back through a thousand years of British history and you find fascinating and surprising stories of social upheaval and shifting class structures, of technological developments and gastronomic revolutions.
Clarissa Dickson Wright completes her journey through the history of our mealtimes with dinner - our main meal of the day and also our showiest. Dinner is when we like to enjoy the finest dishes and exhibit our good taste even if, as Fanny Cradock understood, that involves a touch of snobbery. And, as Clarissa discovers, some people nowadays resort to serving ready meals as if they were their own culinary creations!
But although dinner is our most ritualistic meal, don't imagine that its traditions are timeless and unchanged. In fact, it's a microcosm of 1,000 years of evolving customs. As she journeys back into history, Clarissa reveals that in the Middle Ages, even the most refined diners ate with their hands - we have the Italians to thank for introducing us to the fork. Similarly, we have the humble turnip to thank for making roast beef our historic national dish, and the custom of eating dinner in series of separate courses only came to us via the Russian ambassador to Paris in the nineteenth century. But most surprising, perhaps, is the fact that for centuries dinner was always served in daylight hours. The custom of eating it in the evening only came about because of the increased availability of candles in Georgian times.
Sadly, we have the Victorians to blame for the poor reputation of British dinnertime cuisine, something that even pioneer TV cook Fanny Cradock could do nothing to dispel; and the rise in popularity of ready meals in our own time is no
