Good Morning!

by

Lauren Roberts

Egg-O-See, despite what the name might lead you to think, was actually a flaked breakfast cereal originally made by the Egg-O-See Company of Quincy, Illinois. As described by a 1906 magazine ad whose heading read “Dere aint go'n'er be no leavin's,” it claimed  that that there is no food product that contains so many of the elements necessary to health and proper nourishment as the whole wheat grain, properly cooked. Egg-O-See is made from the whole grain of the very best white wheat grown. It is first thoroughly steam-cooked, with every sanity precaution, and then it is flakes and crisped to a delicious brown, in ovens specially made for this purpose so that every package is exactly the same. That is scientific food making; the Egg-O-See way.” The boxes touted its “absolute purity” while proclaiming it “crisp and delicious.”

The problem with researching many of these early bookmarks from companies that no longer exist is that I cannot be sure what happened to the manufacturer, which is odd when you have a product that a year before the above ad had sold more than 28 million packages annually.. Did it simply die under the ferocious competition that Kellogg’s and Post were waging for the breakfast cereal market? Was it bought out for the purpose of closing it down? I have no idea. What is certain is that by the time Egg-O-See took the ad that cereal had come to dominate the first meal of most Americans’ days.

That wasn’t always the case.

What people had for breakfast depended on who they were, where they lived, how much money they had, and what they did for a living. The word “breakfast” comes from the Latin disjejunare, meaning “to un-fast” or break the fast of the evening. In old French, the word actually became disnare or disner or dinner in English. Thus, dinner was breakfast.

In medieval England, mealtimes were, for the poor, an opportunity. They ate when they could afford it. For peasants in a slightly better financial situation, the trend seems to have been three times a day—breakfast at a very early hour, which allowed for dinner to be served at around 9:00 or 10:00 at the latest, and supper before darkness, around 3:00 pm. Most people ate three meals a day despite the 1478 household ordinance of Edward IV that specified that only residents down to the level of squires should have breakfast except by special order.

During the Renaissance period (1400-1600), entire books were devoted to the proper times for meals. Most favored dinner at 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning since it was believed that digestion was aided by movement and the heat of the sun.  Supper was the evening meal, often served around 6:00 pm. Though most of the authors agreed that two meals were sufficient, the English continued to hold to their tradition of three, including breakfast. This worked well as meal times gradually began to shift. In the sixteenth century, dinner was held around 11:00 am. In the seventeenth, it was more common to have it at 12:00 or 1:00. Samuel Pepys recorded several dinners he ate at 12:00 replete with heavy drinking. In the eighteenth century fashionable dinners moved even later—mid-afternoon being the most common—but sometimes as late as 4:00 or 5:00 pm. This necessitated the “invention” of a new mid-day meal, and the heavier meal, lunch, had become a standard by the end of the century.

In America, Native Americans usually ate cornmeal mush and perhaps cornbread, and early European settlers adapted these for their own breakfasts and added a quick porridge called “hasty pudding,” which was composed of cornmeal and molasses. Later, the meal more commonly consisted of bread or toast and coffee or tea. By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, there was a greater variety of breakfast foods including cheese, jams, rum or cider, and an emphasis on meats. (There were regional variations, of course, but in all meat and/or fish was heavily represented.)

The nineteenth century also saw a lot of changes. Until that time, most people began their day with a heavy dose of meat—usually pork. There was little in the way of fiber with the result being that many people suffered from gastrointestinal disorders. Among them was an interest in dietary concerns that meshed with those of social and religious ones. Moral reformers abounded, and many believed that the typical American diet of meat and whiskey led to societal problems including sexual aggression and masturbation.

Though specific breakfast foods were tied to several factors, including finances, trends can be seen by looking at cookbooks of the era. Several late nineteenth-century ones detail how “heavy” American breakfasts had become. In Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving (1876) by Mary F. Henderson, she took care to lay out suggestions for winter, spring, and summer  breakfast menus.

Winter Breakfast

Spring Breakfast

1st course.—An Havana orange for each person, dressed on a fork (page 338).
2nd course.—Boiled shad, maître d’hôtel sauce; Saratoga potatoes. Tea or coffee.
3rd course.—Lamb-chops, tomato sauce. Château Yquem.
4th course.—Omelet, with green pease, or garnished with parsley and thin diamonds of ham, or with shrimps, etc., etc.
5th course.—Fillets of beef, garnished with water-cresses and little round radishes; muffins.
6th course.—Rice pancakes, with maple sirup.

Summer Breakfast

1st course.—Melons.
2nd course.—Little fried perch, smelts, or trout, with a sauce Tartare, the dish garnished with shrimps and olives. Coffee, tea, or chocolate.
3rd course.—Young chickens, sautéd, with cream-gravy, surrounded with potatoes à la neige. Claret.
4th course.—Poached eggs on anchovy toast.
5th course.—Little fillets of porter-house-steaks, with tomatoes à la Mayonnaise.
6th course.—Peaches, quartered, sweetened, and half-frozen.

This is obviously for a well-off family, of course, but still the amount of food is staggering, and it is notably heavy in meats. Even the famous Boston Cooking School Cook Book (1896) by Fannie Farmer shows a heavy preponderance of meat and fish around the time the first commercial cereals showed up.

The question is: how was a population accustomed to breakfasts heavy in meats weaned off them?

Enter Dr. James Caleb Jackson. Born in Onondago County 1811, Jackson had worked as a lecturer and publisher of abolitionist newspapers. But his health hampered his work, and he decided to undergo a water cure at a hydropathic spa. He not only recovered, but was so enthused that he obtained a medical degree and soon took over a water cure facility located in Dansville that had been founded by a businessman named Nathaniel Bingham in 1851.

Water cures were popular mid-nineteenth century forms of alternative medicine. Included in them were a variety of bathings and showers, wet sheet wrappings, and douches—and lots of drinking (of water). By the time Bingham opened The Danville Water Cure in 1854 there were about 200 in the U.S. alone. Bingham, unfortunately, was sickly and he soon bowed out of the venture. After several changes of ownership, Jackson came to operate the facility in October 1858.

Jackson changed the name to “Our Home on the Hillside.” Its reputation spread, and soon its regime of water treatments, physical exercise and a diet that emphasized fruits, vegetables and whole grains. And it was while he was there that Jackson invented a cereal called Granula. Unfortunately, it was neither tasty nor easy to eat, being made of dense bran nuggets that had to be soaked overnight in order to be even chewable.

Among the most famous patrons of Dr. Jackson’s sanitarium was a woman named Ellen G. White. Led by a vision from God in which she was told that human beings should reject meat, she went on to form the Seventh Day Adventist religion. And one of her church members was a man named Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

Kellogg (1852-1943) was a Seventh-day Adventist, renowned surgeon, health guru, and vegetarian. He recommended a plain diet for both medical and moral reasons, believing that a diet high in fat and protein, white bread, coffee and tea, as well as the use of tobacco, could not produce a person chaste in thought.

His vocation was the health spa and hospital business. In Battle Creek, Michigan, the Seventh Day Adventists ran a health institute where the latest in dietary reform was practiced, but it didn't really catch on until John Harvey Kellogg was put in charge. Under his supervision, the sanitarium became one of America’s hottest retreats, offering unorthodox regimes that included shock-therapy sessions and machine-powered enemas. But Kellogg also stressed exercise and proper nutrition, and placed his patients on a strict diet consisting of all natural, completely vegetarian ingredients; heavy on grains and bowel-quickening foods, while abstaining from all alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. These unhealthy “vices,” as well as any other foods which possessed an abundance of flavor or spice, were considered by the Kellogg brothers, as per their religious beliefs, to cause the patients to fall into lust and to have increased passions. In 1887, he developed a biscuit made of oats, wheat and corn meal. He called a ground-up version of this biscuit Granula. But Jackson sued his colleague for infringement on his brand name, and a settlement was reached. The name was changed to granola, with an ”o.”

Along with John was his brother, Will Keith (W.K.) Kellogg, who was the manager and bookkeeper. They worked together to develop countless variations of granola until, after six years of experimentation, and a kitchen mishap. It happened this way: they would run boiled wheat through rollers to create a very thin cracker-type sheet. They would then roast the sheet and grind it into meal. One night the brothers left a batch of boiled wheat out and forgot about it. The next day, they ran it through the rollers to see if the stale wheat would be salvageable once it was ground. What emerged on the other end of the rollers was flakes, one for each wheat berry. They roasted the flakes and served them to their patients. They had an immediate success on their hands.

Before long, ex-patients were requesting the cereal flakes via the mail. Will fulfilled the orders of these wheat flakes called Granose, and two years after their discovery he created corn flakes. Will tried to persuade John to go along with his idea of selling the flakes to stores, but John adamantly refused, believing it would compromise his integrity as a medical professional. So Will bought him out in 1906 and created the Kellogg Company that with relentless marketing and advertising found such success that it was reaching sales exceeding one million cases of cereal by its third year of operations.

This attracted the attention of a man named Charles William Post who had entered the Battle Creek Sanitarium in February 1893 to recover from a second nervous breakdown. While the stay at the sanitarium didn't do much to improve his health, it did manage to revive a passing interest in food development. By the following year, he had started his own Battle Creek-based sanitarium, La Vita Inn. There, he set to work developing his own coffee substitute (Postum) and breakfast cereals. He published pamphlets with titles such as “The Road To Wellville” and claimed his cereal, Grape-Nuts, could cure appendicitis, improve one’s IQ, and even “make red blood redder.”

Thanks to the national advertising that both Kellogg and Post used relentlessly cereals began to catch on. In his first national campaign, W.K. told women to “Wink at your grocer, and see what you get.” (Answer: a free box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.) The race to the money was on, and hundreds of others leapt into the field as well, many of them journeying to Battle Creek to start their businesses. By 1902, thirty different cereal flake companies had crowded into the small town. And Americans had scores of cereals to choose from, each promising a cure for every ill. By 1911, there were an astounding 107 brands of corn flakes were being made in Battle Creek alone.

Egg-O-See was not one of them. Its home was Quincy, Illinois. I doubt the location had little if anything to do with their failure to survive; the most likely answer to the question of their demise would be that they, like hundreds of other cereal manufacturers, were simply outspent and outmaneuvered by Kellogg and Post. Battle Creek was the right name for the town that became a battle for the changing tastes of breakfast foods in the twentieth century. And all that remains today of the Egg-O-See company is the little heart-shaped bookmark they commissioned.

Bookmark specifications: Egg-O-See
Dimensions: 1 1/2" x 2/5" 
Material: Aluminum
Manufacturer: Egg-O-See Cereal Company
Date: Circa 1906
Acquired: eBay

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,300 bookmarks and approximately 1,200 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Contact Lauren.