Skip to main content

How food snobbery can ruin a full English

One of my favourite treats is having a meal out, and every few months I treat myself to a cooked breakfast. Today I had an hour to spare while one of the daughters was in an exam, and it's wasn't worth driving all the way home, so I popped into The Pantry coffee shop in Swindon's Old Town, were the breakfast illustrated comes in at under a fiver, which isn't bad.

While eating breakfast it struck me that there are a number of ways that food snobbery in some establishments (often posh hotels) ruins this great British tradition. They are as follows:
  1. No beans - baked beans are an essential component of the full English, but often omitted in smart establishments becuase beans are what common oiks eat. They provide essential contrast and help to cut through the excessive meat content that is otherwise at the heart of the breakfast.
  2. No potatoes - I'm afraid The Pantry, as you can see, let me down here. Potatoes make or break the full English. I can understand why posh venues don't want to include hash browns (though there is nothing wrong with these if all else fails), but there is no reason for not providing the real thing, which is fried potatoes. Polly Tea Rooms in Marlborough is excellent at these, though they fall down on the baked bean test.
  3. Too high fallutin' sausages -  possibly my most controversial suggestion, I believe that some sausages are too good for the full English. Let me stress straight away that the tasteless and textureless mush tubes served up in (say) Asda aren't good enough. But if you go for a massively flavourful Cumberland sausage, say, it can overwhelm everything else, and the essence of the full English is being able to mix, say, sausage and potato or sausage and beans and appreciate all the tastes coming together. The right level to pitch it, I'd suggest, is the quality of sausages most supermarkets sell as their premium (Buy the Best/Extra Special/etc.) range.
  4. No sauce - it looks from the picture as if The Pantry let me down on this too, but I just hadn't put it on yet. Most venues will provide brown/tomato sauce, but it can feel very intimidating having to ask for it in a posh venue. For me, breakfast without brown sauce is a limited experience. I also recommend sauce be served either in sachets or bottles. The posh venue will tend to serve it in a ramikin or similar with a spoon. The trouble with this is you don't know what's got into it, or how long it has been standing open to the atmosphere, flies etc. They have no problem putting a bottle of wine on the table - the same should go for sauce. (It also shows if they've gone for a good brand or generic).
The full English (or Irish, Welsh or Scottish) is, without doubt, one of the triumphs of British catering. Long may it remain so, without being watered down by foodie sensibilities.

Comments

  1. I agree with you on the beans. A full english just isn't the same for me without beans and yes on the sausages too. Leave the gourmet sausage for later please.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm a fried bread man myself - I don't need the potatoes at all, but without fried bread it's not a (full english) breakfast.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, Katie.

    It's a personal opinion, of course, John - but for me, fried bread is on a par with mushrooms, black pudding and a tomato - a nice-to-have. Potatoes, on the other hand, are essential. I suspect it's my Irish ancestry coming through.

    (Oh, and thanks to Sarah for reminding me about toast. You do need to have toast on the side.)

    ReplyDelete
  4. And does a full english require a mug of tea? Or is coffee and orange juice acceptable? I guess a cappuccino would be a step too far!

    ReplyDelete
  5. The drink is not an inherent part of the breakfast, so tea or coffee (and yes, even cappuccino) is fine. (As is orange juice, provided it is alongside a hot drink.)

    But I would draw the line at anything herbal. Or alcoholic.

    ReplyDelete
  6. You clearly missed out on some fine times in the seventies for your appreciation of a "Full English".

    One of my clients near Smithfield Market in London insisted on starting the day with a Full English in the local pub (open in the early morning for the market tradesmen) washed down with two pints of Guinness. Needless to say, being a good client services manager, I used to meet him there punctually at 8 o'clock each morning and carry out my first meeting of the day in order to top up the previous night's hangover. Then it would be onto lunch in some similar establishment with fine wines followed by a quick snifter in the pub on the way home. Work was dealt with as a necessary but unwelcome intrusion into our socialising habits.

    I don't think it's like that nowadays - which probably explains why it's so hard to get a decent breakfast, wherever you go in the country.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Absolutely agree with you on the sausages. A breakfast is not the right context for a herby sausage. It has to be good quality though: the top-of-the-range supermarket sausages I find to be often worse than the frozen Walls variety. The perfect kind for me is your average butcher's pork sausage, or even a good quality Lorne. But then that would make it Scottish, and as such it would have to include a slice of haggis, probably the best egg accompaniment.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope