Breakfast with the Brits
Breakfast with the Brits - a Brit-Picking Resource
By popular demand, this month’s Brit-pick theme invites you to break your fast with the Brits. Being a heterogeneous bunch, whose eating patterns are determined by oddities of inclination, class and regional origin, the Brits have an eclectic collection of dining habits. This particular comprehensive and unbiased survey covers the ambrosia-and-nectar part of the British dining experience: breakfast, and that critical and much-underestimated (by foreigners) part of British culture, tea.
Cheers!
“To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day," said the writer William Somerset Maugham. This sage advice hints at the gloriousness of staying at that great British institution, the “Bed and Breakfast”, and accounts for the aghast expression to be seen on the face of the hapless British traveller abroad when confronted with a stale croissant, a small glass of orange juice, and a bill for $14 (plus tax).
This is simply not cricket.
The sturdy Brit expects at the very least two eggs (fried, poached, scrambled, or boiled), two rashers of bacon (fried or grilled) , local speciality sausages (fried or grilled), black pudding (fried), onions (fried), baked beans (Heinz), fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, fried (sliced, white) bread, and sliced white toast with butter and thick-rind seville-orange marmalade. If our Brit is particularly hungry, this feast can be served with a side order of porridge, waffles and crumpets. All included in the price of the accomodation.
Any foreign sweet, gooey, pancake-y pastry-like or croissant-y things are permitted purely in their capacity as “pudding”, and are not to interfere with the savoury and determinedly fried nature of the main meal itself.
The black pudding may be served with a wink and the phrase “Ecky Thump” delivered in a faux-Lancashire accent. Brits who have grown up in the 1970s will instantly recognise the oblique cultural reference (famously someone died laughing at this particular episode of “The Goodies”; oh happy happy memories! We Brits do get frightfully nostalgic about the days when comedy meant savage cultural stereotyping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJxGi8bizEg) and rejoinder with a hearty chuckle and some sort of reference to the size of the B & B owner’s cloth cap.
If dieting, a Brit may be satisfied with a kipper (fried), especially if in someone else’s house, because the problem with kippers is that the aroma of smoked haddock can linger for several months after cooking, and unlike good wine, does not improve with age.
After this exhausting repast, the Brit is now ready to brave the elements, which will largely consist of wind and rain (see previous BritPick post on The Weather for details).
Sadly, the great British breakfast is an impractical daily option, taking, as it does, several months to plan, and several hours to execute.
Youngsters, students and those who have been sent forth alone into the world without easy access to loving parents prepared to shove breakfasts at them, can sometimes manage a few mouthfuls of cereal before waking at the crack of 11 o’clock to go to work / lectures. After a heavy night, last night’s curry remnants, your flat-mate’s carefully apportioned left-overs (that he or she was planning to have for tonight’s dinner), or pizza crusts make a splendid anti-hangover device.
When in a hurry, a Brit might content themselves with a bacon butty (white bread, lots of butter, local bacon culled from pig named Flossie, lashings of mustard - Colmans English, of course, the sort that makes your eyes water - and ketchup - Heinz if you’ve got it). Or toast with butter and Marmite. Marmite is an industrial by-product, made out of brewers yeast. It tastes a bit like salt mixed with charcoal, and has only two things going for it: one, it tastes better than Vegemite, and two, it freaks the French out. Brits eat it by the ton.
The options are infinite, but one thing is absolutely mandatory. Every Brit, by law, has to drink, with breakfast, a mandatory two to three mugs of hot tea, served with milk, and, if you are a tradesperson, two sugars.
[Tradespeople always take two sugars in their tea. It’s something that they’re taught at tradesperson school. The four modules are: plumbing, electrician-ing, leaving the toilet seat up, and the drinking of tea with sugar.]
The majority of Brits agree that perfumed teas such as Earl Grey are a foreign invention, and thus to be treated with suspicion and disdain. As such, they should only be drunk when trying to impress posh visitors, and never first thing in the morning. Everyone knows that the only acceptable brew for a not-yet-fully-awake Brit is black tea of the sort known lovingly as “builders’ tea” or a “lovely cuppa”, and it is nearly always served with milk. There are several acceptable brands of tea, which include PG Tips, Typhoo, Taylors of Harrogate, Sainsburys Red Label, and Twinings Everyday Tea, but never, ever, ever anything with the label “Lipton” on it. {Shudders}.
On occasion, while travelling, a Brit is bemused to come across a brew that is referred to as “English Breakfast Tea”. Alas, this pale imitation fails to deliver on its promises. It’s not English, and it’s nothing like what any self-respecting Brit will have with his or her breakfast. Instead, the average travel-savvy Brit has a stash of enough PG Tips teabags in his/her hand-luggage to last for the duration of the trip.
Beware anyone interfering with this critical travel resource. A tea-deprived Brit is a forlorn and grumpy creature, prone to mood swings and melancholia.
Tea can be drunk at almost any time of day, and is the universal panacea, the solution to all known ills. For a good idea of how tea is woven into the fabric of everyday British life, the foreign observer is advised to refer to that great recorder of social mores, “Eastenders”.
“You evil scum, I’ll ‘ave you! You murdered my daughter! You’ll go down for this, Mitchell! I hope they lock you up and throw away the bleedin’ key!”
“Cuppa tea?”
“Ooh yeah, lovely. Pop the kettle on, love. Ta!”
According to some scaremongering reports, tea-drinking is declining in the UK, and sales of espresso has overtaken sales of tea. But as I sit here sipping from my bone-china mug full of Taylors of Harrogate Yorkshire Gold (made from boiling water, warm the pot first! add the tea to the milk, not the milk to the tea!) I like to think that rumours of this empire-building beverage’s demise are grossly exaggerated.