Soldiers and silverware at the ready — it’s time for an onslaught on this delectably Dippy Egg

 Waking up to a soft-boiled egg topped with Exmoor caviar, served with a platoon of soldiers and paired with our awfully English vodka.

The quintessential dippy egg is indubitably one the life’s simplest pleasures — and our ancestors have been perching theirs in a favourite egg cup for millennia.

The oldest example discovered is a silver egg cup dating back to at least 79 AD, which was unearthed by argaeologists preserved in the ruins of Pompeii in Italy.

In the 18th century, French King Louis XV, famously served soft boiled eggs in ornate cups for breakfast at the Palace of Versailles, where he would challenge guests to a competition to ‘behead’ their morning egg as cleanly as possible using their knife, with points deducted for any broken egg shell flung onto the table.

It was at the same period here in Blighty that the first reference to cutting one’s toast into soldiers appears in print, in an edition of Bradley’s 1732 Country Housewife and Lady Director cookbook describing a "garnish of fry'd Bread, cut the length of one's Finger".

And what better way to adorn this noble treat for than with a princely dollop of caviar, a noble twist on this culinary classic, whether you’re a lady, a King or inded a Roman Emperor.