But by the 19th century a gargantuan breakfast including the delights of kedgeree, inspired by the Raj, and fried brains would have been on offer in the grand houses of the land. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management suggests a spread including grilled fish, herrings, dried haddocks, mutton chops and rump steaks, broiled sheep’s kidneys and some cold meat such as veal and ham pie, nicely garnished. All this, as well as poached eggs, bacon, ham, omelettes, boiled eggs, sausages, muffins, toast, butter, marmalade “&c. &c”. The mind boggles at what might possibly have been “&c”.  Starting the day with bacon and eggs became de rigueur in the 19th century among the new middle classes. Before the bank clerks and city workers set off from the suburbs for a hard day in the Smoke, too far to come home for lunch, their wives would fortify them with porridge and bacon, eggs and all the trimmings. The term “full English” was only coined after the First World War, when lighter breakfasts came into being.  Enter the breakfast cereal. We have Will Keith Kellogg and John Harvey Kellogg to thank for our obsession with cardboard boxes of cardboardy flakes. The brothers produced the first cornflakes as a low protein alternative to a cooked breakfast, in accordance with their Seventh Day Adventist thinking on the advantages of a very low protein diet.  Still, I wonder what they would think of Kellogg’s Frosties, with their 37 per cent sugar. Or the so-called healthy options such as muesli and granola, which are often laden with the white stuff. Would they be fooled by the cereals blazoned with “fortified with iron” stickers which are meaningless since the iron is not in a form that can be absorbed by the body?  Unhappily, the last 20 years or so of breakfasting have been dominated by that scourge of the full English, the Continental breakfast. It’s a mystery why we should want to ape the misery of the cross-Channel wake-up, with its foil-wrapped wafer of oily butter, cellophane-encased spongy roll, and stingy cups of lukewarm coffee.  Now it seems that the one great joy of le petit déjeuner is doomed as well. Half the croissants and Viennoiserie on sale in the boulangeries and patisseries of France is now produced industrially, frozen and shipped to the retailers, with a croissant costing as little as 17p to them.  Welcome to our world, messieurs. Now, I love a good croissant, flaky and soft, from an artisan French baker. But I’ve given up over here – and refuse to buy the pappy, spongy, poor excuses for a breakfast that get offered up as a “treat” at breakfast tables, fresh from the supermarket six-pack with a shelf life of, say, a week, not the hours a good croissant should have.  For me, a real treat in the morning is simple: a crunchy slice of toast with a layer of bitter sweet Seville orange marmalade. That’s a proper breakfast. And smoked salmon and scrambled eggs when there’s a match to win.
Cereals and croissants are not quite enough when there&rsquo;s a match to be won at   Wimbledon