Writing for an hour on a random subject - breakfast

Breakfast. This is supposed to be the only meal that the English can actually do. Somerset Maugham is supposed to have said that there's no problem with the food in England, all you have to do is eat breakfast three times a day. It's one of those weird things though. The English breakfast is one of those things that is supposed to be really English, but in fact almost no English people ever eat it. One of the great tragedies is that some of the few occasions where you can actually get a good breakfast are in “traditional” English bed and breakfasts. And by traditional, I of course mean, insane. I don't know quite how this happened, but sometime after the Falklands war, some bright spark careers adviser decided that the best thing for all retired sergeant majors to do would be to run bed and breakfasts. The first result of this is that breakfast in these establishments starts just before dawn - about 4:30, so you can get a good meal inside you and still get the jump on Jerry/the argies/ charlie/ the towelheads are still sleeping.

The second result of this is that you will have an unnerving conversation about how you would like your eggs with the scariest looking man you've ever seen, yes, he's writing down your order, but he's also scanning the horizon for snipers, who is wearing a floral pinny and carrying a fish slice.

I have to say though, that, even though I really like the English breakfast, the Scottish breakfast is actually even better. Mainly because of the addition of a few crucial extra crazy ingredients that no-one else would have thought of to calling breakfast. Slicing sausage? This is a kind of credit card made out of bread offal and pink food-colouring, which is surprisingly less tasty than that might sound. Black pudding – this is actually health food. Pig fat, blood, oatmeal. But what I used to do when I was a waiter in the highlands was not actually tell the Americans who asked me this until they'd had their first mouthful.

“Excuse me sir, what is in Black pudding?”

Just watch the fork. Yes, it's in!

“Pork fat, cows blood and oatmeal.”

“Is there are rest room around here?”

But actually there are another couple of Scottish ingredients for breakfast that are even weirder than that. White pudding? I have no idea what's in that. It looks and tastes like congealed tile sealant I think it might be a Scottish re-imagining of vegetarian food might be. Fruit pudding. This is a lot like spotted dick, but it's served right there, next to the bacon and the beans and the fried egg. I think this is part of that weird Scottish thing of wanting to reclaim for the savoury everything that we thought was safely categorised as dessert. My feeling is that right now as write, some Scottish fucker is hunching over a red-hot tank of lard trying to figure out how to batter and deep fry a trifle.

Of course the only time that English people actually want to eat a “Proper Full English” breakfast, what with dietary regimes and barely having time to let out that fart before you get on the tube, let alone sit down for a full meal before you go to work. The only time anybody really has the time and the inclination to have an English breakfast is when they're hungover. Which is of course about 6 hours after the sergeant major's are serving it in the bed and breakfasts. So most people end up eat the kind that's only available all the time – supermarket cafes. Service stations.

And for me the bit that does all the good. Is the fried bread. It's amazing. Every diet book in the world would say this is an evil food. The low-card Atkins lot - “That's a piece of bread. Carbohydrates. Evil, evil. That's wheat! The devil's seed.” and the low fat high fibre lot “Ah! Ah! Ah! He's got a piece of fried bread! It's probably been fried in lard!!! That's nearly rape!” Fried bread. It is the motherless child of dietary society. But the weird truth is, it tastes utterly fantastic. I'm sorry, I can't share with you the biochemistry. I think it's messing with your blood sugar and cholesterol levels. But I also have to admit that I've never had cause to eat piece of fried bread in a state where I wasn't also a little bit worried about keeping it down.

But, then, if you do keep it down, there's amazing lull isn't there? You know, when all the blood has gone to your stomach to help out with the lastest gastronomic emergency and you're lolling.

Lets face it English people will eat just about anything. Come to think about it, we'd probably fuck, anything as well but that's a different rant. I mean I'm not saying we're not discerning about some things, accents, class, grammar, the off-side rule. But if you've every been in a self-service supermarket cafeteria and ordered the breakfast, you know we'll eat just about anything. I'm no vegetarian, but you have got to wonder what the point is if when it gets to the table it's in a worst state than the stuff you fed the pigs in the first place.

I don't know quite what happened. I think it's got something to do with rationing. I suppose 10 years of eating powdered eggs and slow-cooking cardboard and calling it “poor mans mutton” will do that to you. My parents generation seem to have had their taste buds shot off in the war.

Posted via email from The Ginger Mumbly