30 Breakfasts Every Medieval Peasant Woke Up To

You ate breakfast standing up this morning. Something out of a wrapper, or cereal poured while you looked at a screen. By half past ten you were hungry again. Then somebody repeats that it is the most important meal of the day. You are not careless about food. You inherited a rule nobody ever wrote a recipe for, only a receipt. The people who worked for a living had a different rule, and theirs got written down. There is a price on that rule and it sits at a counter. An Egg McMuffin averaged four dollars and twenty-nine cents across the United States, up from three forty-nine five years earlier. McDonald's own figure. By the end of this you will know the one line in Chaucer that puts a morning meal on the record, the mid-morning break an employer paid for, and the eleven pence in an account book that gave this meal its name in English. Thirty of them, counting down. I will get to that last one halfway down.