Food History: Bacon Egg & Cheese

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The best way I know to start a Sunday morning is with a bacon, egg, and cheese. New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells said the humble sandwich was designed to satisfy practical needs rather than indulgent desires, but it seems to me that’s only half right. Confronted with the classic trade-off of deliciousness or affordability, the bacon, egg, and cheese says yes. People have been eating bacon, eggs, and cheese individually or in some combination for centuries, but the famous breakfast sandwich that’s ubiquitous in New York City and other parts of the American Northeast is a surprisingly recent phenomenon.

Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and today on Food History, we’re talking about the beloved bacon, egg, and cheese—from the role Sigmund Freud’s nephew played in getting bacon on the breakfast table to the science that gives us perfect processed cheese. Let’s get started!

During the Industrial Revolution in London, factory workers would sometimes stop at a street vendor for a simple sandwich of eggs and sausage grease on a soft roll that originated in Scotland. The meal must have functioned something like a bacon, egg, and cheese does today: a quick, affordable, and portable way to start the day, often enjoyed alongside a caffeinated beverage of choice. Some of those egg sandwiches may have even included bacon and cheese.

Today in the UK, the preferred breakfast sandwich seems to be the bacon buddy, a simple offering with bacon and butter. Interestingly, despite its name, you can find supporters online championing the butterless bacon buddy. The bacon buddy is usually accompanied by either brown sauce or ketchup. The standard British bacon, by the way, isn’t what we’re used to getting here in the States; it’s a less fatty cut of pork that comes more from the loin than the belly, closer to what we call Canadian bacon. The Brits call the stuff we eat in the States streaky bacon.

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The bacon buddy is known as being an antidote for a hangover, not unlike the bacon, egg, and cheese. But does science support these common beliefs about the curative properties of grease? In a word, no. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t based on a real physiological phenomenon. By the time you wake up after a night of drinking, the alcohol has been digested and processed by your body, so there is nothing to absorb. As registered dietitian Amy Shapiro told NBC News, all the delicious carbs in the world won’t soak up the booze. You would have been better off not drinking to excess, but nobody’s perfect.

Part of the reason you crave that fatty meal is a neuropeptide called galanin. Galanin production increases after a night of heavy drinking, so you might very well wake up with elevated levels of this brain chemical in your system, and as University of North Carolina researcher William Gruitchow told Popular Science, galanin increases appetite for fats. So even if the magical hangover-fixing abilities of a fatty sandwich are exaggerated, galanin could contribute to the very real craving for one after an evening of questionable decision-making.

Though breakfast baps preceded the modern bacon, egg, and cheese, it’s not so easy to say there’s a direct link between the two or that the British offering was the first of its kind. There’s evidence for bread production going back more than 14,000 years, so it seems pretty safe to assume that someone ate an egg on bread at some point before the Industrial Revolution, even if they didn’t think to market their creation. Today, eggs on or in bread can be found in cuisines around the world, often alongside a pork product for breakfast or throughout the day.

In Israel, they serve hard-boiled eggs in a pita with eggplant and other accompaniments. Given its roots in the Iraqi Jewish community, it unsurprisingly omits any form of pig. In France, you’ve got the croque madame, a ham and cheese sandwich topped with an egg, often served with béchamel sauce. One of the first popular breakfast sandwiches in the United States may owe a debt to Chinese food. The legendary food writer James Beard posited that the Denver sandwich, which features eggs, ham, bell peppers, onion, and sometimes cheese, may have been the product of 19th-century Chinese rail workers trying to create some version of egg foo young.

Whatever the Denver sandwich’s provenance, it’s easy to imagine the niche a convenient meal you could hold with one hand might have filled during cattle drives or days spent working on the Transcontinental Railroad. So did that early American breakfast sandwich lead us straight to the bacon, egg, and cheese of today? To say the less specific versions of the sandwich are so generic that they’re difficult to track. In Heather Arndt Anderson’s “Breakfast: A History,” she points to an 1897 cookbook for the first recipe for a true breakfast sandwich. For what it’s worth, it calls for chopped meat, not bacon, and does not include cheese.

A 1926 publication from the University of Minnesota on the selection and use of bacon includes a recipe for a bacon, egg, club sandwich served on buttered toast with mayo and tomatoes. A Google book search for “bacon, egg, and cheese” specifically does not turn up anything relevant until 1990. The term “bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll,” the proper full name for the New York sandwich, doesn’t show up until the end of that decade, making an egg seem like prototypical breakfast fare today. But that wasn’t always the case.

That’s not because bacon is anything new; people have been curing pork belly with salt for thousands of years. The practice likely began in present-day China. According to a 1975 paper by researchers from Armour and Company’s food division, people have been raising domesticated pigs in that region for thousands of years. Adding salt to meat, or more commonly today, salts including sodium nitrite, reduces the amount of unbound water available for microbial growth, among other preserving processes.

According to a 2010 analysis from the United States Institute of Medicine, pork has been in the Americas for about as long as Europeans. Christopher Columbus brought eight little piggies with him to the Caribbean in 1493, but Hernando de Soto is the explorer referred to as the father of the American pork industry. He brought 13 pigs from Cuba to present-day Florida in 1539. They thrived, and within three years, the number had grown more than 50 times. Soon, pork products were an essential part of colonial economies. Meat was for eating, of course, but lard could be used for cooking, processing candles and soap, and even therapeutic applications.

Doctors do not generally recommend eating an entire pig in one sitting—don’t bother asking; they just get weird about it. By hanging cuts of meat over a smoldering fire for one to two weeks, people could preserve their pork long before refrigeration was a viable option. I don’t want to blow anyone’s mind here, but smoky bacon tastes pretty good. American colonists agreed. The appetite for bacon seemed especially strong in the American South. After New England author Emily Burke went down to Georgia in the 1840s, she noted that the people of the South would not think they could subsist without their pork. Bacon instead of bread seems to be their staff of life.

Much of that bacon, of course, would have been processed by the skilled but unpaid labor of enslaved people. For as much work as the butchery and curing of pork represented on plantations, it also created a rare opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of indulgence. As Christopher Wilson wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, a study of the Works Progress Administration’s Slave Narrative Project reveals that hog-killing time rises over and over as a joyous memory. It would be a gross misrepresentation to say that pork products like bacon could unite such an unequal and divided country, but the appetite for those products across racial lines was certainly strong.

According to Sam Bowers-Hilliard’s “Hog Meat and Cornbread: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860,” one estimate placed the per capita consumption of pork during the period at three times that of Europe. As the 19th century turned to the 20th, though bacon sales waned, large breakfasts started to fall out of favor as the country urbanized. Fewer people felt the need or had the time for a hearty morning meal, and as we discussed in a previous episode, breakfast cereal started to gain popularity around that era, thanks in part to a guy who had a lot of thoughts about health.

Bacon hadn’t by any means been exclusively a breakfast food, but these new eating habits helped put a dent in its popularity. The Beech-Nut Packing Company wanted more Americans to “bring home the bacon,” so in the 1920s, they enlisted the help of Edward Bernays, sometimes called the father of public relations. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, honed in on breakfast, thinking he could argue that a larger morning meal is better for health. Four out of five doctors agreed—actually, around 4,500 out of 5,000. Bernays had asked physicians to write to thousands of his colleagues, and the great majority, according to Bernays, at least co-signed on the concept of a heavy breakfast as scientifically desirable.

Around the same time, companies like Oscar Mayer found success in the U.S. market selling pre-sliced bacon, eventually helping to cement its place as a worthy part of a complete breakfast. With the connection of bacon and eggs established, it was only a matter of time before they’d find fame between bread.

There’s not much to say about the second ingredient in our sandwich. Our ancestors were probably eating eggs before they were even Homo sapiens, with some estimates for human egg consumption going back millions of years, long before anyone domesticated birds. An ancient Roman cookbook has a recipe for something like an omelet with honey. For the record, the egg portion of a bacon, egg, and cheese is definitely a “choose your own adventure” kind of thing. You can specify scrambled or fried, or just let your grill cook it. You can also request a specific kind of cheese, but the standard issue sandwich definitely comes with American cheese.

This, in my book, is the correct choice because it’s made by blending cheese with emulsifying salts, among other things. It has the ability to melt without breaking or turning greasy the way traditional cheese does. A common choice for an emulsifying salt is sodium citrate, which I got into back in our episode about nachos. By making the proteins in it more soluble, sodium citrate helps create the perpetually melty nacho cheese common at stadiums and school cafeterias.

Despite its name, the science behind American cheese was developed by two men from Switzerland and one from Canada, and okay, maybe one in New York too. In the early 1900s, Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler used sodium citrate to repurpose excess cheese scraps and preserve Switzerland’s beloved Emmental. Shortly after, whether he was building on the Swiss process or working completely independently is a matter of some debate, but Canadian-born J.L. Kraft came up with what he called “warm cheese.”

Let’s talk to some folks in marketing about that one. Kraft’s original presses didn’t include emulsifying salts. The first U.S. patent to include that element came from the aforementioned New Yorker George Herbert Garstin. But as you might have guessed from Kraft’s last name, his company ultimately made the biggest mark in the processed cheese game, which raises the question: to cheese or not to cheese?

Kraft Singles were, for a time, considered a pasteurized processed cheese food by the FDA, which means they had to have at least 51% cheese content. Kraft has since rebranded under the uncontrolled label of “pasteurized prepared cheese product,” with the cheese content likely remaining the same. The FDA also says that processed cheese foods, along with some related products, must be formed into a homogeneous plastic mass. That doesn’t mean your Kraft Singles are made from petroleum, though; the FDA is using a different meaning of the adjective “plastic,” like Merriam-Webster’s third entry for the word: capable of being molded or modeled.

On that note, cheese carving is absolutely a hobby you can pursue. In the estimation of professional cheese carver Sarah Nep, it takes about 20 hours to create a cheese bust, if you were curious. One of Nep’s pieces portrayed former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

At this point, we’ve discussed the history of bacon, eggs, and American cheese, but there’s one key missing ingredient from our bacon, egg, and cheese. Sure, you can get a breakfast sandwich on a bagel or brioche, but when New Yorkers complain about not being able to find their favorite breakfast item in other states, I think they’re really saying they can’t find the same kind of roll called a hard roll or kaiser roll. The former name apparently came into fashion during World War I, thanks to anti-German sentiment. It has an almost cracker-crisp crust on the outside and is soft and chewy on the inside.

In the apt words of one ex-New Yorker on Reddit, these are not bespoke artisan creations. According to a piece by Sadie Stein in the New York Times, most rolls sold at delis and coffee carts come from a few large distributors. Large in this case does not mean bad; the kaiser roll actually comes from a proud lineage of high-quality industrial baking. At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, one of the attractions was Louis Fleischmann’s Vienna Model Bakery, which featured, among other award-winning offerings, consistently tasty kaiser rolls. Fleischmann soon found success with bakeries throughout the Northeast. He’s also incidentally credited with pioneering the practice known as the breadline; his bakeries would pass out simple sustenance to residents in need.

There are a number of stories about how the kaiser roll got its name, all related to its German meaning “emperor” in English. That could be because the design on top of the roll looks like a crown, or it could be an homage to the man sometimes called the most beloved leader of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph I. Others say it’s a nod to Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and supposedly has something to do with the royal deregulation of roll prices. I have no idea which is correct, but I will point out one weird fact: Louis Fleischmann, who helped popularize kaiser rolls in the U.S., actually received two medals from Kaiser Franz Joseph I for his bravery in the Austro-Prussian War. He was apparently shot off his horse twice in one battle.

It’s true! The kaiser roll, with or without poppy or sesame seeds, proved popular in New York’s Jewish community and beyond. It provides a perfect textural backdrop for a bacon, egg, and cheese. It’s not too bready, but it has the heft to stand up to the other ingredients and adds an extra level of crunch. It will survive if you eat it on the street, as Mother Nature intended.

There’s surprisingly little out there about how this exact combination of ingredients came to be viewed as its own defined dish and spread throughout bodegas and delis sometime in the second half of the 20th century. It seems to have proliferated at truck stops, diners, and food carts—places where people wanted to get something tasty and fast. Fast food itself might have helped popularize the concept of a grab-and-go breakfast sandwich. In the early ’70s, Jack-in-the-Box locations had started operating 24 hours a day and eventually came up with the Breakfast Jack: ham, fried egg, and American cheese on a hamburger bun.

Around the same time, and what we can generously assume was a coincidence, a California McDonald’s operator decided to create a breakfast version of eggs benedict. It became known as the Egg McMuffin. The bacon, egg, and cheese, as I know it, isn’t as conformist as a McMuffin. There are certainly no Teflon rings involved to shape a perfectly circular egg, but I defy you to watch a grill cook prep a half dozen sandwiches in four minutes or less until you ever need to get food in your hands faster.

Sometimes food is about luxuriating in the moment—slowing down to enjoy a hot bowl of soup in winter or a dozen cold oysters on a sunny afternoon. Other times, especially in a busy metropolis with a debatable mass addiction to work—what other city would brag about never sleeping?—food is about the most efficient method of getting nutrients into your body. And sometimes, when the right dish comes along, it’s about both.

There’s an old expression you might hear in fields as diverse as plumbing and filmmaking: you can have it fast, you can have it good, you can have it cheap—pick two. But thanks to the bacon, egg, and cheese, when breakfast rolls around, as long as you’ve got a five-dollar bill in a deli within walking distance, you can pick all three.

Thanks for watching Food History! Let us know in the comments below your favorite breakfast sandwich, and I will ruthlessly judge them. Just kidding! Where am I? I’ll see you next time.

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This version removes any inappropriate language and maintains a respectful tone throughout.