FACTORALY - E25 BREAKFAST

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

According to nutritionists, this time it's the most important meal of the day. There won't be much nutrition in sugary cereals, but you might feel better for a Bircher. Find out all about the breaking of the fast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone! Hello! Hello Bruce! Hello Simon! You're looking very fit and fine and fabulous today. Ah, the wonders of a digital representation on a screen. You look as though you've been eating well. I haven't been eating too badly, actually, yes.

I've had my most important meal of the day, but we'll come on to that later. What? Why will we do that? Oh, I know. It's because we're doing breakfast. We are doing breakfast, yes. Let's do it right now. Let's have this meeting over a big fat fry up now before we get started um by way of explanation to anyone who's accidentally in the wrong place at the wrong time welcome to fact orally this is a weekly podcast with two british voiceovers who get together and talk about interesting random facts from seemingly dull

subjects yes so um our day jobs are sitting in padded rooms, sound treated rooms, talking into very nice expensive microphones and telling people how wonderful things are and how to do stuff. Yes. That sums up my job. And then just for funsies, when we finish doing all of that, we get together and we pick out the interesting facts from all and sundry. Yes. So this week's random subject is breakfast.

Breakfast, yes. So Bruce, talk to me about your experience of breakfast. Are you a breakfast kind of man? I quite like breakfast. I feel a bit like you. If I need to lose a bit of weight, then that's the only meal that I'll cut out, really. Right. Because I'll sort of like stop eating breakfast.

But I have a standard breakfast. You know how some people have standard clothes that they wear just like, so they don't have to think about what they're going to wear every day? Yes, I have several versions of the same red plaid shirt in my wardrobe. I think people do the same thing with breakfast, generally.

Yeah. You get up in the morning and you go, and you put two slices of bread in the toaster and then you get out the butter or whatever and you get out the Nutella and the peanut butter and the jam or whatever it is that you make. Or you smash a few avocados, whatever you do, and you get on with the day.

It's only generally at the weekends that people ring their changes, generally, I think. What about you? I mean, I love a good breakfast. I will very, very happily go out somewhere and have a fried breakfast or a brunch of some kind. Absolutely delicious. When I do eat breakfast at home, it's usually quite dull and efficient.

It's just a bowl of cereal because it's necessary. It's functional. I haven't really got much time before doing the school run let's get something down but at the moment I'm intermittently fasting and therefore I'm not doing breakfast and lunch just my own preference not advocating it to anyone it has mixed opinions don't take my word for it but in theory yes I love breakfast. Just not right now. I imagine that the kind of breakfast that you love is one that we're going to talk about. And we should talk about it right now.

Go on then. Let's talk about the full English breakfast. That almost wants to be done in some kind of a Voice of God-esque. The full English breakfast! Kind of way,esque, the full English breakfast. Kind of way, doesn't it? It does. So, or the full Irish breakfast, or the big Australian breakfast. Or the standard American breakfast.

Any country, basically, that we've had an empire at any given time has a breakfast. Yes. Which consists of probably has a breakfast. Yes. Which consists of probably a fried egg. Yes. Or two. Probably bacon. Certainly. Probably some sort of sausage and some sort of fried element, which can be bread or potatoes or something.

Yes. And there are options. things like baked beans. Tomatoes, mushrooms, black pudding, toast, chips, anything, really, anything at all, you can put onto the side of those key sort of four or five ingredients, yeah. Yes. But the full English, basically, the idea was it was enough calories to keep you going for the rest of the day because you didn't actually stop for lunch. Yes. So you would eat enough calories to make you fit and strong until you got home at sort of 4 o'clock in the afternoon or whenever it was that you breakfast, which has its variations all over the world, became unnecessary to some degree because people started to work in sitting down professions.

Oh, I see. So you don't need so much. So you don't need so much. If you're a farmer, you need that help to take that barge, lift that bale. But if you're going to just sit there with a quill or a laptop then then you don't need it so necessary no so i i saw um as with many of these things it is impossible to put a an original date on it because no one has ever sat down with a big fat breakfast and written down i am the first person to ever eat this meal it just wouldn't't work. But there are records of a breakfast meal

that sounds remarkably like what we've just described going back to the 13th century. Yes. In this country, at least. And at the time, it was the preserve of the wealthy. It was a feast that one had in one's feasting hall because one was opulent and could afford to do so. A feast to break your fast.

To break your fast. Breakfast, indeed. And I've mentioned there are various different iterations. We call it the full English because we're English. But there are also, like, there's an Ulster breakfast, which includes the soda farries, which is soda bread. Okay. There's sort of like going around the country.

Then we go to Wales. They use lava bread in a Welsh breakfast. There's a thing called lawn sausage in a Scottish breakfast. Lawn? Lawn, L-O-R-N-E. Not as in grouse. Correct. Lawn sausage is like a half-inch thick square of sausage meat.

Sounds all right to me. But you fry it. There's no skin on it. Right. And some people swear by it. They think it's lovely. I'm not so sure. With a Scottish breakfast.

Sort of a sausage patty. Yeah. And with a Scottish breakfast, you also get haggis, fried haggis, and white pudding. And black pudding. But white pudding is more sort of oaty. Which is very similar to something they have in, ironically, from all the way up to the north of Scotland. You go back down to Cornwall, down in the very south of England. And they have a thing called Hog's Pudding. And Hog's Pudding is practically identical

to white pudding in Scotland. Is it? And they even do one which is quite similar to haggis. Oh, okay. Interesting. And a black pudding. Yeah, so this Hog's Pudding, this Cornish Hog's Pudding is something that goes into a full Cornish. A full Cornish, of course, yes. Wouldn't want to mix that up with a full English, would you? No.

I've had a full Irish whilst on holiday in Ireland, and it included something called a boxty. Ah. B-O-X-T-Y, boxty, which was a sort of a fried potato pancake. Ah. Which was actually very nice. It looked out of place, but it was very nice, and served with a little glass of whiskey on the side as well a huge bowl of porridge sorry sorry well well back back back

whiskey for breakfast yeah oh yeah start the day as you mean to go on bruce yes there were we i uh i sort of hopped from one b&b to another around Ireland, around the Atlantic Way. And a couple of places served a little glass of whiskey that you could either sort of pour into your porridge or just neck at will. It went down a treat. How do you like your porridge? How do you like your porridge in the morning? I like mine. I'm not really a massive fan of porridge, actually.

Are you not? If I were to have it, I would have it with honey or golden syrup or something like that. Yeah, you see, I never used to be a fan of porridge until I started spending a lot of time in Scotland. And then I discovered a thing called pinhead oatmeal. And pinhead oatmeal is delicious. But you have to cook it the night before, or even the day or two days or a week before. And you make a whole lot of porridge using this pinhead oatmeal,

and you soak it, and then you cook it. And what they used to do in Scotland wasland was they would um cook a whole bunch of porridge up and keep it in a like a zinc lined drawer in the kitchen okay so you'd have like a porridge drawer that's brilliant and and you would chop like a square of of porridge out of the drawer right and then put it in a bowl heated up or put it in the saucepan heated up and then put maybe a bit of milk or cream and a bit of yeah i like mine with a bit of scottish heather honey nice rather than rather than sugar and quite a bit of salt and it is absolutely delicious that does sound rather good now this might garner an awful lot of comments but um i know we have quite a few scottish listeners to this show if anybody

can share their own experiences of Pinhead Porridge or any other local dishes, wherever you're from, tell us what your favourite kind of breakfast is. Oh yeah, tell us what your breakfast is. Oh, we'd love to know what sort of breakfast you have where you live. What do you know about muesli? I know that it's tasty. I know that it's made of rolled oats and bits of grain of other varieties. I don't know much, really, actually, as I'm saying it out loud. What do you know about muesli, Bruce? I know that it was invented in Switzerland in about 1900 by a Swiss doctor called Maximilian Bircher-Benner. Once more, just for Lloyd's. Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Benner. Once more, just for Lloyds.

Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Benner. Very good. Although his idea of muesli wasn't what we think of currently as muesli, necessarily. But what he did was he got some rolled oats, not the pinhead, the flatter oats,

and he would soak them in lemon juice and condensed milk right and apple juice and bits of apple overnight and then that's what you would eat in the morning that would that was the very first muesli back in 1900s right okay my my only experience of muesli is alpen oh yes which for some reason I can't explain this for a second. When I go on holiday, I often buy things that I don't have the rest of the time in order to sort of make it special and punctuate it slightly. It's like going shopping around a supermarket

with all the unusual and different stuff that you find in supermarkets. Yes, exactly, yes. And every now and then I pick up a box of muesli that just lasts me the length of the holiday. And that's very nice. And I don't have it at any other time. So that's my full experience of muesli is a bowl of Alpen. And hence, I mean, the reason it's called Alpen, obviously, and the picture of the Alps on it is because it's got that link back to the Swiss. Breakfast cereal is one of those things that has come along quite a long way since then. This is a massive subject. I mean, forget breakfast as a whole.

We could have done a whole episode just on cereal. I held back slightly just because it's such a big topic, but I had a quick look at Kellogg's. I had a quick look at the Kellogg's Corn Flake. And this goes back further than I realized, all the way back to 1898. The Kellogg brothers, William and John Kellogg, they were making granola, about which I know even less than muesli. So if you've got anything to tell me about granola later on, please do.

They were making granola and somehow or other, they got the recipe slightly wrong and they ended up accidentally making flakes of wheat, wheat flakes. And they thought, oh, that's quite nice. I wonder if we can turn that into a thing. And they changed the recipe and they experimented a few times. They ended up using corn instead of wheat. And ta-da, corn flakes were born. I didn't realize they were that old or that unintentional. Yeah, they were like the first sort of like mass produced breakfast cereal like that.

Yeah. I was never able to eat cornflakes without a large helping of sugar when I was a kid. I then moved on to Frosties and all the other sugar laden, terribly unhealthy cereals that came after that. Well, interesting because actually of the two brothers, John Harvey Kellogg was a doctor and his brother wasn't a doctor. And Dr. John Kellogg was going, oh no, we mustn't put any sugar in this. It's very bad for you. The point of this cereal,

well, I'll get onto the other point of the cereal in a minute. But the point of this cereal is to be healthy and for people who want to live a good life. We don't want to ladle it full of sugar. And Bill Kellogg said, well, you know, maybe it would taste nicer and people would eat more of it and it full of sugar and bill kellogg said well you know maybe it would taste nicer and people would eat more of it and buy more of it and we'd be richer if we put a bit

of sugar in right okay that seems reasonable he knew his market so i've made mention there of something other than health reasons why cornflakes exist. Yes. Do we do a trigger warning now? Oh, OK. OK, trigger warning. Sex is now being mentioned for the next few minutes. No one would ever have expected that to be the topic that immediately follows cornflakes. No, well, cornflakes were invented.

John Kellogg felt that the more luxurious your breakfast, the more lascivious your lifestyle. Right. So he believed that if you had like luxuries and glories and everything, you would become quite sexual and you'd become quite rude. And he felt that sex is actually very bad for you. He felt so strongly that sex was bad for you that he and his wife, he was married, had separate bedrooms, practically lived in separate houses, never had sex, but he had eight kids. Oh. All adopted. Okay. So he adopted eight children. And the most detrimental aspect of sex to him was self-gratification. Sure.

So the idea of Corn Flakes was to reduce your sex drive to the point where you didn't feel like playing with yourself. Oh, that's brilliant. Everyone's having so much fun. Tell you what, we need to temper everyone down a little bit. Let's introduce Corn Flakes. They got around a bit, though, Corn Flakes. They got around a bit though, Corn Flakes. Did they? Where did they get around to?

The moon. Did they? They took Corn Flakes to the moon? They took Corn Flakes to the moon. Kellogg's made some special packs for astronauts. It was like a sealed pack that contained a portion of Corn Flakes and some freeze-dried milk.

So it was not too heavy. And then you would basically add water to this pack, give it a bit of a shake, and the freeze-dried milk would turn back into milk. And you could have your cornflakes and milk on your way to the moon. That's great. One of my favourite things when I was on holiday, I don't know whether you get this,

there are these little boxes of cereals. A variety pack. They were a variety pack. Yes. Yes. Love that. Now, I used to think that they were really useful because you could just pour the milk straight into the box.

You philistine. Really? Well, you can because it's like a greaseproof paper, so it doesn't leak. You just open the box, just pour the milk in. Sure, you can. But should you? To quote Jurassic Park, you were so busy thinking about whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should.

That just seems odd. But what was your favourite of the variety packs? Cocoa Pops. Cocoa Pops. Yeah. I used to like Rice Krispies. Dida Pops. Cocoa Pops. Yeah. I used to like Rice Krispies. Did you? Snap, Crackle and Pop.

Well, you say Snap, Crackle and Pop because you're British. Indeed. They're international versions. They are international versions. So in Norway and Sweden, they're called Piff, Paff, Puff. Oh, I like that. That's nice. And Belgium is very similar. It's Piff, Paff, P. Oh, I like that. That's nice. And Belgium is very similar.

It's Piff Paff Poff. Piff Paff and Poff. Yes. In Finland, it's Pox, Rix and Rax. In Germany, Knisper, Knasper, Knusper. Oh, that's nice. And in Italy, again, it's Piff Paff Poff. Wow.

Right. Okay. So the Snap, Crackle and pop is onomatopoeic. It's linked to the sound that they make when they're crackling in the bowl. Piff, paff, poff seems more like a description of the look and the shape and the method of making those things in so much that they're sort of puffed up and filled with air. Like small explosions. Yes.

Yeah. Well, originally, Snap was on his own for a while, and Snap was joined by Crackle and Pop during the Second World War. Good to have a buddy. I've just suddenly remembered one of my claims to fame is that I used to work with the Honey Monster. The mascot of Sugar Puffs was this yellow, fluffy creature called the Honey Monster. And I used to work with a gentleman who put that suit on for those commercials during the 80s. mascot of sugar puffs was this yellow fluffy creature called the honey monster and um i i used to work with a gentleman who um put that suit on for those commercials during the 80s

oh wow talking of commercials for cereal as you're expecting fully i guess i was yes i did commercials for cereal back in the day of course you did any particular ones well the one you'll remember is the ones i did for Ready Breck. Right. Central heating for kids. You wrote that? Yeah. Great. Now, I really like a continental breakfast.

I do love a full English, but whenever I go away anywhere and they have that kind of spread on, I won't bother with the hot stuff. I'll just make an absolute meal out of the cold meats and cheeses and pastries and that sort of thing. And, you know, quite a staple of that is the croissant. Oh, yes. Yes, of course. I love a croissant. You know, having a croissant with your coffee is a lovely continental thing to do for breakfast. And you can't really get more french than than a croissant can you except uh they're actually austrian um so what we now know is the croissant was invented in austria really long time ago in in the medieval era there was something that was roughly croissant shaped

that was being served for for breakfast in austria uh originally known as the Kipfel. And it was much later, like hundreds of years later, that France found it, twisted it a bit, made it a little bit lighter and puffier, and called it a croissant. I find that fascinating. So quintessentially French wasn't originally French. Absolutely. And obviously having that with a nice cup of milky coffee. In Italy, it's thoroughly frowned upon to drink a milk-based cup of coffee past 11 a.m. I'll have a cappuccino or a latte any time of day at all,

but in Italy, milky coffee is very, very much a breakfast item. And the tangents, there are tangents upon tangents here.'m sure we'll do an entire episode on on coffee one day but um very briefly i was just sitting there thinking about having a croissant and a cappuccino and i remembered um the name of cappuccino um comes from italian cappuccino fryers yes monks because they wore sort of a creamy brown habit and roughly the colour of a cappuccino. Of course. And that's why they were named that. Also the same reason that cappuccino monkeys are named that as well because they're a similar colour. Oh, not because they have that bold spot on the top of their heads?

No, not because of that. Okay, interesting. So the croissant is actually Austrian then? Originally, yes. There is an Austrian is actually Austrian then? Originally, yes. There is an Austrian and German expression about bacon. Go on. There is a thing called Kummerspeck and Kummerspeck is grief bacon.

Grief? Grief bacon. And it's basically the weight gain that you put on when you're unhappy. It's called Kummerspeck. Oh, that's great. Henry VIII liked a good breakfast, but not just for himself. Okay. His ladies-in-waiting for his brides also got given an allowance of breakfast. Right. And their allowance for breakfast was two loaves of bread per breakfast.

What? A joint of beef per breakfast. And a gallon of ale. Fine. Well, yeah, why not? Yeah. I found out that kippers, you know, having kippers for breakfast. Oh, yes, yes.

Which I've never done. I've never fancied the idea of that. I like kippers. Do you? Yeah, yeah. I used to think a kipper was a fish. It's actually a way of preparing a piece of herring, isn't it? Kippering.

It's a verb. It's a style of cooking. He was a poet, wasn't he? Kippering. Kippering. He also made exceedingly good cakes. So, yeah, you take a herring, you split it, you smoke it, not like a cigar, but, you know, you put it over a smoky fire, and that's a kipper. And these have been served for breakfast throughout the land, you know, for years and years and years. But it was in 1842 that Queen Victoria, whilst on holiday to Scotland,

had kippers for breakfast. And the whole thing became very popular because, obviously, whatever the royalty is doing, everyone else is going to copy. Oh, yeah. So that's when kippers for breakfast became such a popular thing. I think they've fallen out of popularity now. I can't think of the last time I've seen that. You can buy boil-in-the-bag kippers now, which is kind of…

Can you? And they're all sort of properly boned and everything. So it's literally just the fish. Usually with like a little sort of bit of butter in there and stuff. Yeah. So it goes buttery. I always remember my mum going to the fishmongers and asking for kippers by the pair. A pair of kippers?

A pair of kippers. So a pair of kippers was basically one herring. Oh, I see. That had been split in half. So it looks like two. So it looks like two. So she asked for a pair of kippers, just meant one. I found it quite interesting seeing where things come from.

So, you know, the French croissant is from Austria. The kippah was popularized by Queen Victoria visiting Scotland. Orange juice being drunk at breakfast became popular in America in the 1920s as a response to the Spanish flu. Oh, OK. As a health boost, you know, getting your vitamin C. Belgian waffles, I had a bit of a brief look down. My son loves Belgian waffles. They were originally, they came from Brussels,

where they were created in 1839. And they were introduced to America much later, in 1964 at the New York's World Fair by a restaurateur called Maurice Vermesh. He took these waffles to America and he thought, these Americans, they've probably never heard of Belgium. They probably don't know that Brussels is the capital of Belgium. I'll call them Belgem, B-E-L, new word, G-E-M, waffles.

It's a cute sounding little name. So Belgian waffles were originally marketed as Belgem waffles. Isn't that great? Because, I mean, American health kicks have been responsible for a few things. Sure. For example, in the 60s, there was this big health kick for breakfast and people started to have yogurt for breakfast in the 60s. It wasn't really a thing before that at all.

No, no, I've forgotten all about yogurt for breakfast. And so, yes, it was considered like a healthy, I don't think they talked about your digestive tract and all the horrible stuff that an activeurt will do to your gizzards. But it was the thing to do, to have yoghurt for breakfast. Now, you mentioned the gargantuan breakfasts of Henry VIII's wives. I tried to find a Guinness record for the largest full English breakfast. So many parameters, so many things that define biggest.

There's one record for the heaviest breakfast served in a restaurant, in this country at least. There was a cafe in Bolton called Mario's Cafe, and they serve up a 2.9 kilogram plate of bacon and eggs sorry 2.9 that's nearly six pounds six and a half pounds six and a half okay yeah of bacon and eggs for only 10 pound 95 um and if you can finish it within 20 minutes you'll eat it for free and and then probably you know don't have a heart attack um so that's one record that i don't that's obviously not a full english that's just bacon and eggs but certainly very big i found a cafe in doncaster who serves up this full english breakfast it's estimated to contain around 17,000 calories. Okay, that's eight times your daily intake.

Approximately, yeah. And this cafe serves up this thing that consists of 15 rashers of bacon, 15 hash browns, 15 fried eggs, 15 pieces of black pudding, 15 slices of toast, 15 portions of mushrooms, 15 portions of baked beans, 15 portions of tinned tomatoes and 15 double-sized sausages on a very, very large plate.

Wow. And you're invited to join in the challenge and see if you can eat this thing within an hour. I mean, I don't fancy it. Well, I have no more facts about breakfast, so i think it's about time that we did have breakfast that's us done then we have uh gone on for long enough have a wonderful time have a wonderful breakfast and uh thank you for listening to factorily subscribe like share tell your nerdy mates we know you have them. You're just like us.

Yes. And please come again soon. Bye. Cheerio.