The Full English is the one meal that England does well, with fat bangers, sizzling rashers and eggs oozing sunshine, strong tea and two buttered toast.

This is food that makes you feel good just thinking about it, a platter that pulls on the heartstrings (as well as straining the heart). It’s an icon of Englishness, as much of a symbol as the flag of St George, but here’s the thing: who really eats it these days?

Less than 1% of the population starts every day with a cooked breakfast, compared to the 1950s when it was more than half of us. I was thinking about this the other day, chewing (and chewing) my compulsory muesli while dreaming of bacon and eggs. If the full breakfast is so representative of the English, what does it say about us? And if our attitude to it has changed so much, what does “the Full English” really mean — not just in the sense of what is on the plate, but in terms of being fully English?

Those questions inspired a mad, bad, salt-soaked road trip from culinary heaven to hell and back, and from one end of the country to the other. Come with me, if you want to see what the English are really like now. But prepare for some very strong and surprising tastes.

Where better to start than at a place that dares to call itself a “quintessentially English hotel”? The Goring in Victoria has been run by the same family for four generations and claims to be the last five-star luxury hotel in London that can say that. Breakfast here is not cheap, if you include a room. My £850 suite is nice enough, and has a very groovy mirror that turns into a television, but I wake up raging at the wallpaper.

It is covered in drawings of scenes from an estate, including the lady of the manor wafting around and a gardener who is hauling a manual lawnmower across a back-breaking expanse of grass. What makes me so angry is that almost everybody who slept in the bedroom before me over the past 100 years would have identified with Her Ladyship. Not me.

Downstairs I walk past a bust of the Queen Mother and into a dining room recently made over by David Linley, the viscount and designer. The tables are draped in heavy cream linen and set with blue-and-white china. The chef comes out to meet me, and the first thing I want to ask Derek Quelch, who worked at the Savoy and Claridge’s before this, is a burning question that occupies all lovers of the English breakfast. Hash browns, Derek. Yes or no? “No,” he says, quickly and firmly. “Never. They’re American.”

Derek is a hardliner on this one. All traces of foreign influence have been struck from the menu, including baked beans (unless the customer wants them, because the service here reaches cult-like levels of intensity). Ask for the works and you get a truly wonderful breakfast with a lot of English pig: sausages with natural skins, sweet-cured, unsmoked bacon rashers cooked crisply, and black pudding from Cumbria made with blood. There are eggs, of course, mushrooms, lightly grilled tomatoes and a cute bubble of meat that turns out to be a lamb’s kidney. Bless.

“For us, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” says Derek. “If a guest is spending hundreds of pounds on a room, the breakfast has to reflect that. You will see captains of industry and cabinet ministers in here, we get some real high-flyers in the morning.”

There is wealth on display. Even “Big Dave” Morgan-Hewitt, the hotel managing director, tells me he spends thousands on a good suit. Those are big suits, mind. “I shouldn’t be having this,” he says, scooping cold bacon into toast for a quick sarnie after the guests have all gone, with a napkin at his throat in a Bunteresque fashion. “I’m having lunch in an hour with the princes’ private secretary.” Yes, he does mean William and Harry. We are only a stroll from the palace, and this has long been the haunt of royalty.

The first thing you learn at the Goring is that the class system has become a theme park, where people with money can pretend to be aristocrats. The clever ones do it on the cheap, bringing their contacts here for breakfast to be impressed. “Since the recession, more people are coming for breakfast,” says Derek. “They don’t have to buy wine, so it is cheaper, and they can get back to the office for a full day’s work.”

Eccentricity is very much part of the brand, in a mild form. The 44-year-old owner, Jeremy Goring, is a surfer who wears an open-necked shirt and swears quite often. “Ninety-nine per cent of sausages worldwide are shit. Particularly when you go outside England.” He goes on frequent road trips with his chef, “out in the middle of nowhere to find food that they don’t want us townies to have”, and was the first hotelier of his kind to employ his own forager.

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