This article explores the tonal, structural and conceptual importance of the breakfast table scene within Frances Burney’s second novel, Cecilia (1782). Building on Sarah Moss’s work exploring ambivalent attitudes to food within Burney’s life writing, I show that within Burney’s fiction the breakfast scene often operates as a site of discomfort, anxiety and entrapment. Moreover, I suggest, in dialogue with other recent readings of Cecilia that have highlighted key scenes as particularly crucial to the novel’s structure, that the breakfast scene acts as a “hinge” (to re-purpose Arnold Palmer’s term), which opens the door on a new character, development, or section of
the plot; it is a narrative signal that an important shift is about to take place.