Etiquette and the Royal Breakfast

 The Prince of Wales’ set recently adopted the idea from the French and all London’s rapidly taking up the custom! – No doubt the Americans who have gone to England to help celebrate the Queen's Jubilee will return imbued with the idea that soup for breakfast is the only proper and polite thing. The custom has long been prevalent in France, and is now being introduced in London.

The Prince’s New Breakfast 

The Prince of Wales Has Recently Set the Fashion 

No doubt the Americans who have gone to England to help celebrate the Queen's Jubilee will return imbued with the idea that soup for breakfast is the only proper and polite thing. The custom has long been prevalent in France, and is now being introduced in London. “At all the first-class cafés in Paris,” says a gentleman recently returned from the other side, “the patrons can get soups of various kinds for breakfast, and a great many Parisians sip soup before putting anything more substantial in their stomachs. In London, two months ago, Henry White, the swell secretary of the American legation, invited me to breakfast, and the first thing on the menu was soup. He told me that the Prince of Wales’ set had recently adopted the idea from the French and that all London was rapidly taking up the custom.” 

Mr. White set the pace for Americans over there, and whether or not he entertains all of his countrymen who are flocking to the Queen’s Jubilee, he can introduce enough of them to this new fad to cause the whole outfit to come back home singing its praises. “It is really one of the most sensible gastronomic innovations I can imagine. Soup, when properly made, is both soothing and stimulating. The over-taxed stomach of the average American needs both to be soothed and stimulated the first thing in the morning. Therefore, I look for the soup idea to become immediately popular when it is brought over by our tourists. Doubtless they will invent a name for it, as the fashionable folk of this country are afraid to risk their standing among the gourmets by eating for breakfast a dish with so plain and vulgar a name as ‘soup’.” – Los Angeles Herald, 1897

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia