“To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day,” W. Somerset Maugham once said.

Even though the toast comes on a separate plate, you still have ample room on your main plate to re-home your toast and join it in matrimony with the egg yolk

And nowadays we can, thanks to the stacks of boxed cereals to choose from. But what of real food, the kind that fills our breakfast plate with an appetising selection of unique tastes and leaves you full, energised and set up for a serious day of hard labour?

Poached, scrambled or fried? Tomatoes or beans? Black pudding or mushrooms? Bread fried or toasted? Tea or coffee? These are the questions I expect my brain to pitch as I begin the daily ritual of indulging in my morning meal, for nothing gives you a wake-up call as the full English.

Having lived on my family farm for years, I’m used to lining my stomach with this traditional and scrumptious meal, with chickens and pigs providing me with fresh eggs and bacon. Now that I’m in Malta, I’m still hoping to find one of equal standard. Someone, please find me the taste of home I so badly yearn.

Since time immemorial, we’ve started the day with a serving of calories to kick-start our body. But it was certainly a surprise to discover that breakfast as we know it’s only a few hundred years old – breakfast was only put on the menu when the middle class started to work regular hours in offices. Before heading out for the daily grind, the man of the house would be offered porridge, followed by a cooked selection similar to what we still enjoy today.

And there I was, thinking that the full English was for the hearty field worker, the brave coal miner and the sea-ravaged fisherman, consumed to fuel mind, body and soul for the onslaught of hard work they awaited them. But alas, these proper workers would eat whenever they could, normally between shifts or at most lunch and dinner.

It’s a sad fact that no one seems to know exactly when it all started. What we do know however is that the hearty fry up has made its own journey of evolution. In the 1861 Book of Household Management, Mrs Beeton suggested a daily breakfast buffet that included a cold joint of meat, game pies, broiled mackerel, sausages, bacon and eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade, butter, jam, coffee and tea. Hearty indeed but could you move even the lightest of quills after such an intake?

I don’t think I would. I prefer a more modern take on the most important meal of the day. My breakfast is English in its roots – however, it has only been called the full English since World War I, with “full” being a prefix to differentiate between lesser continental breakfasts of juices, croissants, cheeses and cold cuts. Nowadays we can enjoy the meal any time of the day, thanks to the ever popular all-day breakfast – and should you want absolutely everything on the menu then it’s a full-Monty you’re after.

The ingredients for a full English depend on where you dine. However, there are key ingredients without which your breakfast wouldn’t be English – these are eggs, bacon, mushrooms and tomatoes. These four ingredients can be married together in what seems like a never-ending list of combinations, offering a full platter of flavoursome experiences.

When in London, there’s only one place I go to for a perfect English breakfast – Chamomile Café on England’s Lane. Here, breakfast is plated perfection. The eggs are lightly poached to form small pockets of soft whites hiding darkly delicious yolk inside. You only get one sausage so as not to distract you from the eggs. Two large mushroom heads fried in garlic and a small bed of plump red tinned whole tomatoes, heated but not boiled so as to retain the flavour. The bread – separately plated so as not to risk an invasion by the juicy army of the tinned tomatoes – is properly toasted with real butter evenly spread. And even though the toast comes on a separate plate, you still have ample room on your main plate to re-home your toast and join it in matrimony with the egg yolk. The bacon is fried with crispy edges and sits next to a small hash brown.

Sometimes, I will ditch the hash brown for a portion of Chamomile Café’s famous bubble and squeak – leftover vegetables from last night’s dinner, fried until they literally bubble and squeak.

If the full English is a song, then the black pudding is my favourite note – a blood sausage made from pig’s blood. This is hard to find outside the UK, but if it’s on your plate, make sure it’s lightly fried, piping hot, crumbly and soft, so you can spread it on your toast like a fine pâté.

At this stage you may notice that I have left out the baked beans. These were introduced into the breakfast portion during World War II due to rationing constraints – this is why I prefer the humble tomato to the baked beans. I think that beans are a bit full of themselves. Moreover, I don’t like beans.

Finish off with a large mug of hot tea and you’ve got yourself a winning taste of England.

Variations of the full English breakfast

• Corned beef hash.
• Sliced sausage, also known as Lorne sausage or square sausage – very popular in Scotland.
• Hog’s pudding – expect it when in Cornwall and Devon.
• Kidneys, grilled or fried.
• Potato bread, also known as fadge or tattie scone.
• Oatcakes, especially popular in the North Midlands.
• Fruit pudding.
• Laverbread, a type of seaweed popular in Wales and usually cooked alongside bacon and cockles.