Abstract

This article discusses the relevance of an understudied and apparently marginal topic for historical research, the topic of breakfast. In order to evaluate how the analysis of diet, ingredients, dishes and meals such as breakfast can help us to discover hidden aspects of the cultural and social environment of the nineteenth-century Caribbean, it focuses on colonists and travellers’ notes about their meals and on their cognitive dietary dissonance, that is, the difference between their ideas, perceptions, and the reality in the ways they described the various breakfasts they met. The essay mainly reveals two aspects of daily life in the colonies: on the one side, both the British political elite and the US economic one had to accept that, willingly or not willingly, they had to stick to an unknown diet and a breakfast that had the same ingredients as that of the slaves. On the other one, they continuously struggled to find a balance between their health, familiar habits and the tropical climate.