Geeky Fact
An egg on bread is old. The breakfast sandwich, as America means it, is not. Through the middle of the 20th century it lived at diners, truck stops, and New York deli counters. A fried egg, some meat, a roll. Nobody had given it a national name.
In 1971 Herb Peterson, a McDonald’s operator in Santa Barbara, wanted a breakfast that could survive a car. He started with eggs Benedict, swapped the hollandaise for a slice of cheese, and set it on an English muffin with Canadian bacon. He cooked the egg in a Teflon ring so it would fit. That was the Egg McMuffin. It cost 63 cents in test markets in 1972 and went national in 1975. In 1977 McDonald’s put a whole breakfast menu on the board. Once a drive-through could sell the morning, everybody else did too. Biscuits, croissants, bagels, the bacon, egg, and cheese. Breakfast stopped being a table and became something you carried.
