It’s interesting to compare the traditional breakfasts of the countries you’re fortunate enough to visit.
Breakfast in Belgium was meat and cheese and not much more, Scotland and Amsterdam served porridge, Northern Ireland challenged us with its famous bun and fry-up, but the ubiquitous Continental breakfast, prepacked and placed at the hotel or motel door was, as always, convenient but character-free.
I’m not sure what the traditional Australian breakfast is. My fairly standard brekky includes muesli, fresh fruit and home-made yoghurt, and variously cooked egg with avocado-spread wholegrain toast and a cuppa. On Sundays there’s usually time for an extra slice of buttered toast with marmalade or honey. It’s traditional in my home at least. To me, that’s a big breakfast.
But wait! There’s more – much more – in breakfasts across England’s Thomas Hardy country.
Here in the south-west of England I don wellies, (short for Wellingtons, and a lot shorter and more rubbery than Lord W’s leather boots) to venture off the pebbled path to the car, or even to find the path after another nightly downpour.
I’m wishing Australia could share the wintry weather in this land of flooding drains where it’s getting harder to find dry wood for the fire. Forgive me if that seems un-PC to Aussies suffering an excess of the stuff.
But back to what I once thought was a big breakfast…
The worthy denizens of the tiny Dorset village of Corscombe cook up a REAL Big Breakfast in the village hall, every first Saturday of the month from 9.00 a.m. We noted the sign near the sole village shop-cum-post office at neighbouring Halstock: Price £8.
A warm hall and a welcome cuppa greeted us at 10.00 a.m on the day. We found seats at one of half a dozen neatly laid tables, most already occupied. One of the cheery hall committee volunteers arrived to read out the menu. We thought she was offering the optional ‘sides’ to go with the basic fare, but no, it was a long list of the staple ingredients of the traditional English cooked breakfast, as it’s done in Corscombe. The list was a verbal tick box for diners to opt out of, not into, any of the ingredients.
You could forgo perhaps one of the fried eggs, a huge juicy mushroom, a thick slice of black pudding, or all three or more, but the remainder of the breakfast would still fill an outsize plate. After all, this is not just a full English breakfast; it’s a BIG one.
We learned from our tablemates that many of the local residents tucking in around us included farmers and their families, many of whom had been up before sunrise, (pardon the poetic reference to an almost mythical event) milking, carting hay, unbogging tractors, or whatever they needed to do before darkness fell at 5pm.
This tucker is for hard yakka in the autumn fields making hay while the sun still shines, but in wet and windy February an English cooked breakfast is the country’s comfort food.
Ingredients differ slightly depending on availability, local custom and the cook, but baked beans in tomato sauce and Misss Piggy’s pink and portly relatives play a major role in all of them. Kosher or vegan it ain’t; suffice to say that black pudding is a rich source of iron.
When you see a sign saying ‘English Breakfast – all day’, that’s exactly what you get, and more. It’s a magnet for value-for-money-seeking backpackers. Forget lunch and dinner; you can survive very happily all day on an English cooked breakfast. Bon appetit!
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