The Great Breakfast photo thread
Discussion
CharlesdeGaulle said:
dimots said:
Worth a try, 4 and a half leaping salmon out of five.
That looks bloody brilliant. Were I being uber-picky I'd maybe observe that the yolk should be slightly runnier, but I'd definitely eat that. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/12/finall...
Telegraph article said:
"Before the war, and beyond that again, when breakfasts were breakfasts indeed...” Thus wrote Constance Spry in her formidable 1956 culinary bible, The Constance Spry Cookery Book. Those breakfasts she recalls with such nostalgia were heroic affairs: a flotilla of silver chafing dishes containing eggs, crisp bacon, devilled kidneys, cold grouse, kedgeree, grilled bloaters, herring roes on toast, crumpets, Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, and more: “Pig’s thinkers, Davey?” suggests Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew to his fastidious future brother-in-law, lifting the lid of a delicious breakfast dish of brains.
Historically, the British have been diffident about celebrating our rich culinary tradition, allowing the international joke of our terrible food to flourish unchallenged. But here is a rare admission by one of our European neighbours that there is a meal at which we excel. The Spanish daily newspaper El Pais recently published an article in praise of the “absolutely wonderful” English (sic) breakfast, tracing its evolution from the Edwardian splendour depicted on the groaning sideboard of Downton Abbey (vastly popular in Spain) to that cherished national institution, the greasy spoon.
It is a curious fact that, while the importance of breakfast is universally acknowledged, only the Brits really understand how to break a fast in style. In a vignette, “Breakfast Room”, the essayist Walter Benjamin observed that a disinclination to eat breakfast is a sign of reluctance to engage with the coming day. In an otherwise relentlessly gloomy poem, Anne Sexton recalled breakfast as “the sexiest meal of the day”.
Yet from Europe to the Americas, breakfast is generally a repast at best meagre, at worst nauseating. In Italy, a mouthful of espresso and a cigarette. In France, yesterday’s sad bread dunked in cafe au lait.
In the United States, they take breakfast almost as seriously as we do. The gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson called breakfast his “psychic anchor”, recommending “Four bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes... sausage, bacon or corned beef-hash...Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk... a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert...” Certainly that would set one up for the day.
But my own experience of American breakfasts is dispiriting: soggy bacon, anaemic eggs, microwaved hash browns and lashings of undrinkably weak coffee.
Then there is the abomination of cereal, satirised by Saki in his eerily prescient story, Filboid Studge: “Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify themselves... with health biscuits ... battened aggressively on the new food”. (The present Government, incidentally, might care to borrow for its own purposes the epigram of the War Minister in Saki’s story: “Discipline to be effective must be optional.”)
Whatever they ate for breakfast, Spry, Benjamin, Sexton and Thompson agree about the unique emotional power of the first meal of the day. Reflecting on the meals that have meant most to me, I light on this: breakfast as a student in George’s café (long gone) in the covered market at Oxford. Bacon, egg, mushrooms, black pudding, a vast mug of Camp coffee, and dripping toast. Ah, dripping toast and Camp coffee: the robust British equivalents of those weedy Gallic memory-triggers, madeleines and lime flower tea.
Historically, the British have been diffident about celebrating our rich culinary tradition, allowing the international joke of our terrible food to flourish unchallenged. But here is a rare admission by one of our European neighbours that there is a meal at which we excel. The Spanish daily newspaper El Pais recently published an article in praise of the “absolutely wonderful” English (sic) breakfast, tracing its evolution from the Edwardian splendour depicted on the groaning sideboard of Downton Abbey (vastly popular in Spain) to that cherished national institution, the greasy spoon.
It is a curious fact that, while the importance of breakfast is universally acknowledged, only the Brits really understand how to break a fast in style. In a vignette, “Breakfast Room”, the essayist Walter Benjamin observed that a disinclination to eat breakfast is a sign of reluctance to engage with the coming day. In an otherwise relentlessly gloomy poem, Anne Sexton recalled breakfast as “the sexiest meal of the day”.
Yet from Europe to the Americas, breakfast is generally a repast at best meagre, at worst nauseating. In Italy, a mouthful of espresso and a cigarette. In France, yesterday’s sad bread dunked in cafe au lait.
In the United States, they take breakfast almost as seriously as we do. The gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson called breakfast his “psychic anchor”, recommending “Four bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes... sausage, bacon or corned beef-hash...Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk... a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert...” Certainly that would set one up for the day.
But my own experience of American breakfasts is dispiriting: soggy bacon, anaemic eggs, microwaved hash browns and lashings of undrinkably weak coffee.
Then there is the abomination of cereal, satirised by Saki in his eerily prescient story, Filboid Studge: “Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify themselves... with health biscuits ... battened aggressively on the new food”. (The present Government, incidentally, might care to borrow for its own purposes the epigram of the War Minister in Saki’s story: “Discipline to be effective must be optional.”)
Whatever they ate for breakfast, Spry, Benjamin, Sexton and Thompson agree about the unique emotional power of the first meal of the day. Reflecting on the meals that have meant most to me, I light on this: breakfast as a student in George’s café (long gone) in the covered market at Oxford. Bacon, egg, mushrooms, black pudding, a vast mug of Camp coffee, and dripping toast. Ah, dripping toast and Camp coffee: the robust British equivalents of those weedy Gallic memory-triggers, madeleines and lime flower tea.
Dibble said:
BrabusMog said:
That’s not a sandwich, it’s a toastie/on toast. [/pedant]Either way, it’s cut wrong. You filthy, deviant b
d.- cutstraightacrossistheonlywaynoneofthisdiaginalbolleaux
I only cut sandwiches if they have bacon in them, otherwise I just eat it as one piece 
And that's just lightly toasted bread, if I had done it on the George with some cheese and oregano it would have been a toastie.BrabusMog said:
Dibble said:
BrabusMog said:
That’s not a sandwich, it’s a toastie/on toast. [/pedant]Either way, it’s cut wrong. You filthy, deviant b
d.- cutstraightacrossistheonlywaynoneofthisdiaginalbolleaux
I only cut sandwiches if they have bacon in them, otherwise I just eat it as one piece And that's just lightly toasted bread, if I had done it on the George with some cheese and oregano it would have been a toastie.Correct orientation of cut.
My only gripe would be a slight under-allocation of the main event.
hyphen said:
illmonkey said:
Yea, what’s the difference between pitta and bread? Apart from the mess of my hands after!
One is thicker, and better at soaking up the beans sauce. And at beng toasted- that cheese isn't melted, so guesisng cold?
The other one I put back in the toaster
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