A new manifesto for breakfast
‘The best of any meal should perfectly fuse the base with the noble...’ The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester
My wife’s grandmother used to lay her breakfast table at night. Tablecloth, cutlery, crockery. She would place halves of grapefruit in a bowl, the segments pre-loosened with a natty curved knife, the top dusted in sugar, before being entombed under a cloche. If a little cooked breakfast was due, the pan was left out on the stove, rashers of bacon laid in the pan ready for the morning frying. Or, if eggs were to be boiled, they went in a small pan on the stove. I can only assume that little curls of butter were prepared on saucers in the fridge. They had a Teasmade too, by all accounts, which meant a freshly brewed tea would be steaming in one's cup at the very time the alarm clock chirruped to alert you of the new day. It is the sort of breakfast scene I have always been drawn towards.
My grandparents were not so exacting, although the breakfast table would always be laid before bed in much the same way. What they did share, however, is an understanding that the best breakfasts are those with multiple courses. I am not talking lavish, gout-inducing, bacchanalian morning feasts, but quite gentle modest multi-course breakfasts set to enliven and bolster for the day ahead.
Some reading around the subject suggests that proper breakfasts in the home have been in steady decline since the ‘30s. Much was wrong in the world in those decades between the two world wars, but breakfasts were charming affairs. It was at this time of breakfasting zenith that many of the potential highlights of any fantasy breakfast nowadays will have been present. Grapefruit or a piquant fruit salad; kippers, smoked salmon or kedgeree; perhaps mushrooms or something deviled on toast, eggs either scrambled, poached or coddled even, maybe a rasher or two, or a fat herby sausage.
It was the Edwardians who took the full breakfast spread as enjoyed, historically, by the landed gentry, (but had, like many things, become popularised as an affectation of the burgeoning Victorian upper-middle class of industrialists and merchants,) and commodified it as a fry up, perhaps accompanied by fruit jam and a cup of tea, but no longer the multi-course spread it once was. Now one knew for certain that sausage, egg, beans, mushrooms, toast, etc. would be present on a breakfast plate for a fair price; and before long, we’re told, the working man started to use this new breakfast as ballast and sustenance for a long working day. When understood in this context, one can understand why the kipper and the grapefruit quickly ended up in the bin.
It’s a long time since most of us were coerced into any sort of sustained manual labour, and for those who are, it is now more often the ‘Continental’ breakfast that has been commodified into breakfast at speed; four-packs of all-butter croissants, bottles and cartons of juice and cold milky coffees, or even cans of energy drink, are the go-to now, and can all be secured for a couple of quid from any street corner, anywhere.
The majority of us though are desk-bound, if not necessarily office-bound, and this might just enable us to usher in a new dawn in breakfasting.
Up until the nationalisation of the Railways, for the equivalent of about £9 in today's money, British Rail would offer a three-course breakfast in its Pullman dining cars. These would consist of fruit, a kipper or something similar, and then a cooked breakfast replete with toast, butter jams and your choice of tea or coffee. I would suggest some adjustments if this was to become a daily occurrence, but the dieticians and the self-professed wellness pioneers all espouse breadth and variety in one’s diet; plus, taking on the bulk of your calories in the morning, and decreasing the ballast ones takes on later in the day is sound logic to me - breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dine like a pauper, as the sometimes sage, sometimes dangerous American nutritionist Adelle Davis espoused.
So, the grapefruit returns. Or at least something arresting and fresh. The metabolism loves a jolt from tart fruit. I fondly recall the bowl of melon balls my grandfather used to prepare at breakfast. He had a specific little spoon that eased perfect orbs from a ripe melon, somehow leaving them smooth as marbles, gallons of sweet juice entrapped within. Even a banana or a chopped pear, perhaps with a handful of nuts or toasted oats would satisfy the opening gambit of my proposed new breakfast.
I would love to reintroduce a little oily fish at breakfast time, although I appreciate it does have its challenges. I lived for a period with a woman who cooked fish daily on a Foreman grill, (the flat top griddle pioneered by the wonderfully cumbersome ex-boxer George,) and it would leave a stale fishy scent in our flat each night that used to ripen staggeringly by morning. There must be a way around this. Was the Forman grill particularly bad for this? Maybe the solution is nothing more than an open window? I am sure though that we need to better channel our Japanese kin, (in both diet, portion size and preparation,) and allow a little piece of fish, perhaps smoked and warmed through, or gently fried in some oil, into our breakfast arsenal. A doctor friend is always keen to point out that Omega 3 is about the only thing, essential as it is, that we struggle to get enough of in our diet, even with the most finessed of intentions. This alone might make suffering a little fishy scent worth the while?
I went to see the quaint heist movie cum Loachian social drama, The Duke, this week. Set in 1961, Jim Broadbent plays a charming old Lefty, Kempton Bunton, a real-life cove who was dead-set on two things, securing free TV licences for OAPs and writing Chekovian plays for the BBC. There are no spoilers in telling you he stole a Goya and held it ransom. It’s a funny little film. More pertinent for me though, is a section in the movie when Kempton gets a job working early shifts at a bakery. Up at 5 am along with him, his wife cooks him a steadying breakfast of eggs, toast and something else savoury to send him on his way. There’s much to unpick in the dynamics of this domestic arrangement, but we’re here for the contents of the plate so I’ll focus on that. One fried egg, a rasher of bacon or a piece of black pudding. Pleasingly restrained, is what I thought. We’ve been sold the working man as a caricature; the fork wielding oaf who shovels great quantities into his gaping orifice in order to fuel his manual labour, but that is wrong. When the cooked element is part of a larger whole, then a single gently cooked egg and a piece of toast can suffice. For the modern-day office-bound milquetoast, myself included, perhaps a boiled egg or two might be perfectly serviceable, or a simple omelette or modest scramble.
So many of those I canvassed before writing this are stuck in a breakfasting rut. Many rely on boxed cereal or granola, most of the remainder lean on toast, a small majority look to fruit, either chopped or blitzed into a drink, but the regular sentiment was that breakfast for them meant taking on board enough fuel in an efficient manner in order to get them through to lunch. When lunch is then a meal-deal designed to deliver enough energy to get one through to dinner, and dinner is then whatever one has enough energy to muster up from what is in the fridge, the picture of a weekday of feeding oneself starts to look pretty bleak. No wonder so many of us don’t bother to cook.
So as a suggestion, how about the following model. We make more of a pleasing feature of breakfast. We start the day with good bolstering healthy choices that allow us to reach lunchtime in good order. Whether we lay the breakfast table the night before, is to be handled on a case-by-case basis. All I’m saying is that it might create more time in the morning for focussing on what treats to eat.
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