What Mexico Actually Eats for Breakfast, and How to Build It in a British Kitchen

We already have two articles on Mexican breakfast: a different Mexican breakfast for every day of the week and brunch ideas using Tesco and Sainsbury's ingredients. Both are lists of things to cook. This one is not. It is about what the Mexican morning is actually shaped like, which is the part that does not translate, and about which pieces of it can realistically survive contact with a British Monday.

There are two breakfasts, and that is the whole structure

The thing that confuses people is that Mexico has a morning meal at around seven and another at around eleven, and both are called breakfast in English. Desayuno is the first one: early, small, often liquid. Coffee or atole, a piece of sweet bread, fruit. It happens before work or school and nobody sits down for long.

Almuerzo is the second, mid-morning and substantial: eggs, chilaquiles, beans, tortillas, salsa. This is the meal that photographs well and the one most British readers think of as Mexican breakfast. It exists because the main meal of the day, the comida, is not lunch at one o'clock but a proper three-course sit-down at two, three or four in the afternoon, with supper reduced to something very light at nine or ten in the evening.

So the Mexican day runs on four small-to-medium events rather than the British three, and the big one is in the middle of the afternoon. Once you see that, the morning food makes sense: almuerzo is not an indulgent weekend brunch, it is a working meal that bridges six hours of labour to the real meal at three.

What gets eaten standing up

A very large share of Mexican breakfast is street food consumed vertically, in five minutes, on the way to somewhere. The canonical example is the guajolota: a tamal inside a bread roll. Carbohydrate wrapped in carbohydrate, bought from a cart or a bicycle at a transport interchange, eaten with a cup of atole, and the single most efficient breakfast ever devised for someone with a long commute and no time. In Mexico City it is institutional, and arguing about whether it is good for you is not a conversation anybody is having at six in the morning.

Alongside it sit the tamal on its own, in a leaf or a husk, from a steaming pot; the torta de tamal, which is the same idea under its other name; and small bread-and-tamal combinations that vary by city. The drinks are the other half: atole, a warm, thickened maize drink, and its chocolate version champurrado, poured from an urn into a polystyrene cup. Atole is food rather than a beverage, which is why it works as breakfast on its own. There is also cafe de olla, coffee simmered in a clay pot with cinnamon and piloncillo, which is sweeter and spicier than any British filter coffee and is drunk by the small cup.

And there is fruit: mango, jicama, cucumber, pineapple and watermelon in a bag or a cup, with lime, salt and chilli powder on top. It takes British visitors a while to accept chilli on fruit at eight in the morning and about a week to start demanding it.

The eggs, which is where the vocabulary lives

Almuerzo at home is overwhelmingly eggs, and the names describe the sauce rather than the cooking method.

• Huevos rancheros: fried eggs on a lightly fried tortilla, covered with a cooked tomato and chilli salsa. The most exported version and still a good one.
• Huevos divorciados: two eggs, one under red salsa and one under green, with a barrier of beans or chilaquiles between them so they do not touch. The name is the joke.
• Huevos a la mexicana: scrambled with chopped tomato, white onion and green chilli, for the colours of the flag. Three ingredients, two minutes, and the most-cooked Mexican breakfast in Mexico.
• Huevos con frijoles and huevos tirados: eggs scrambled directly into refried beans so the two become one thing. Veracruz.
• Huevos motulenos: a Yucatecan construction of tortilla, beans, egg, tomato sauce, peas, ham, fried plantain and cheese. Breakfast as architecture.
• Machaca con huevo: dried shredded beef rehydrated and scrambled with egg, from the north. Recipe here.

In every case there are tortillas on the table and salsa on the table, and the eggs are a vehicle. Bread appears as well, in the form of a bolillo, but the tortilla is not optional.

Chilaquiles, and the argument about them

Chilaquiles are yesterday's tortillas, cut, fried or toasted until crisp, then simmered briefly in salsa and served with cream, cheese, raw onion and often an egg or shredded chicken on top. They are the best thing to happen to leftovers in any cuisine, and they exist because a household that eats tortillas daily always has some going stale.

The argument is about texture, and it is genuine and unresolved. One camp wants the tortillas to keep some crunch, which means they go into the salsa at the last possible second and you eat fast. The other wants them soft and fully soaked, closer to a savoury pudding. Red against green is a second front in the same war. Nobody is going to win, and the green version is where we would start.

The weekend is a different meal entirely

Saturday and Sunday mornings belong to two dishes that are not weekday food. Barbacoa on Sunday morning, lamb steamed overnight and sold from early until it runs out, eaten in tacos with consome. And menudo or pozole, the long-simmered tripe or hominy soups that are the recognised Mexican cure for the night before, sold from stalls that open at seven and are busiest at nine. There is no British equivalent of a queue of people eating tripe soup at nine on a Sunday morning, and the absence says more about British breakfast than about Mexican.

Pan dulce belongs to this register too: conchas, orejas, cuernos and the rest, bought by the tray with tongs from a bakery and eaten with coffee or dipped in hot chocolate. It is a daily habit in Mexico rather than a treat, and it is the one piece of the whole system that translates to Britain with no adaptation at all.

What survives a British Monday

Most of the above assumes a street vendor, a bakery on the corner and a pot of beans somebody started yesterday. A British weekday morning has none of those. Three things still work, and they are the three we would actually recommend.

Huevos a la mexicana, because it is two minutes, three ingredients, and everything is in a British supermarket all year: tomatoes, onion, a green chilli. It is the most honest import on this list because it is what Mexican households cook on a weekday for the same reason.

Chilaquiles from whatever tortillas went stale, which requires only that you have salsa in the fridge. Make the salsa on Sunday and the Tuesday version takes eight minutes. This is also the answer to the half-packet of corn tortillas that always goes hard.

Champurrado or cafe de olla, because a warm, spiced, thickened drink is a genuinely different way to start a cold morning, and Britain has rather more cold mornings than Mexico City does. Champurrado needs masa harina and a cinnamon stick; cafe de olla needs ground coffee, cinnamon and dark muscovado standing in for piloncillo.

What does not survive: the guajolota, unless you are making tamales anyway, because nobody is steaming a pot at six on a Tuesday. Barbacoa, which needs an overnight pit or at least an overnight oven. And the two-breakfast structure itself, which depends on a working day that ends with a large meal at three in the afternoon. You can import the dishes. You cannot import the timetable, and pretending otherwise is why so many Mexican breakfast articles read like weekend fantasy.

Common questions

Do Mexicans really eat chilli for breakfast?

Yes, and not as a novelty. Salsa is on the breakfast table the way salt and pepper are on a British one.

What is the single most common Mexican breakfast?

Eggs with beans and tortillas, or huevos a la mexicana, at home. On the street, a tamal and an atole.

Is cafe de olla just coffee with cinnamon?

It is coffee simmered rather than brewed, with cinnamon and unrefined sugar, in clay. The clay and the simmering both change it, and the result is sweeter and softer than anything a cafetiere produces.