What’s the difference between an English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish breakfast?

According to Country Life magazine, “The idea of the English breakfast as a national dish goes right back to the 13th century and the country houses of the gentry. In the old Anglo-Saxon tradition of hospitality, households would provide hearty breakfasts for visiting friends, relatives and neighbours.” A full breakfast is so popular these days that many places will list it on their menus as an ‘all-day breakfast’. In England, black pudding can be found on almost all breakfast dishes, including The Wolseley where they’ve named theirs simply, ‘The English’. Some places, though rarer these days, would serve fried bread too, lending to the well-known nickname ‘fry-up’. Certain parts of the country have their own traditions too, like Cornwall which proudly offers a ‘full Cornish’ that consists of hog’s pudding (a type of sausage) and Cornish potato cakes (made with mashed potatoes mixed with flour and butter and then fried).

Some of the distinctively Scottish elements to a full breakfast is a Lorne sausage (also known as a square sausage) and a Stornoway black pudding, which is made in the Western Isles of Scotland. Tattie scones are also quite common in a full Scottish; it’s essentially a scone made from boiled potatoes. Occasionally you’ll find haggis (a savoury pudding traditionally cooked while encased in the animal’s stomach), fruit pudding (a mixture of suet, wheat and currants, sultanas and raisins) and oatcakes (a bit like a cracker or biscuit) too. The Hyland Cafe in Glasgow is legendary for their traditional Scottish breakfasts, which are served all day.

Both the Scottish and Irish breakfasts tend to commonly feature white pudding. Like a black pudding, it’s made with oats and suet but without the blood. Soda bread and potato bread are distinctly Irish too. The former is made with baking soda (hence the name) and the latter is made with, yep – you guessed it – potato. The Culloden Estate and Spa’s Vespers restaurant does a famous Irish breakfast that comes with all the usual full breakfast ingredients, as well as the Irish elements for good hearty measure.

A traditional Welsh breakfast tends to reflect the coastal regions of Welsh cuisine. There two key ingredients setting it apart from the other “full” variations. These are cockles and laverbread. Cockles of course are a type of mollusc and traditionally they were served to Welsh miners for breakfast with bacon and fried laver, which is a seaweed purée often mixed with oatmeal and then fried. Pitch in Cardiff serves a full Welsh breakfast until 2pm.