LondonCNN — 

Picture something extremely British. Now double it. Did you imagine the Beatles, striding across Abbey Road — the twist being that their classic album cover is rendered in the contents of a full English breakfast?

In 2012, food artist Paul Baker cooked up this exact scene. John is the (scrambled) eggman, while vegetarian Paul is tastefully made out of mushrooms. Abbey Road is re-surfaced in baked beans, a bacon Volkswagen Beetle pulled up on the side. Slabs of white and brown toast form the marked crosswalk.

In one fell swoop of edible absurdism, Baker’s artwork demonstrates the cultural heft of the full English breakfast. Devoured in the nation’s “greasy spoon” cafes and motorway stop-offs — not to mention some of its ritziest hotels and restaurants — this gut-busting symphony of bacon, eggs, sausage and various other cooked ingredients (invariably sluiced down with a steaming cup of tea or coffee) has become shorthand for Britishness.

It is as big as the Beatles, bigger. Like “Abbey Road” itself, the full English — or “fry-up” or “full monty” or “cooked breakfast” — is both revered as a thing of godlike genius, and has its sour-faced critics; those who claim it is too chaotic, too self-indulgent for its own good.

So where did the full English originate? How did it come to define a nation? And come to think of it, what exactly is it?

The evolution of the full English breakfast