Two Chaps Talking

Breakfast seems, on the face of it, to be the place that even the most discerning gourmets can let themselves go. There isn't a celebrity chef anywhere that won't admit enjoying a fry up, slopped out by some hairy-handed grease monkey. Certainly most of us wouldn't regard the first meal of the day as the place for control, balance and highest quality ingredients yet, tinker with the layout of a chap's breakfast and you take your life in your hands.

This whole tirade was triggered by an order of eggs benedict while hungover., The perfect egg, flavour packed bacon and viscid Hollandaise had been lovingly laid over a lightly toasted round of brioche instead of an utterly artificial fresh-out-of-the-carcinogenic-bag 'English' muffin . I wasn't merely disappointed or mildly miffed, there was a debilitating physical sense of abandonment and betrayal. My head dropped into my hands and, I swear, vodka infused tears prickled behind my eyes. It wasn't just that they'd messed with something that required no messing or that brioche was so profoundly wrong. The twist of the knife in my heart was that everything else was just so right and I needed it to be right so badly.

This got me thinking. Our Mums are right that in the nutritional sense, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but what a lot of people seem to have forgotten is how important it is emotionally and symbolically. Breakfast was the last kind thing your mother did for you before sending you out into the combat zone of the bus and the playground. What sort of incredibly powerful embedded coding is that? If the fact that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world is in any part due to the fact that he was a bit geeky, not very sporty and rather bullied at school then the importance of breakfast in the collective unconscious is overpowering.

Think back, for a moment to the rituals of your own family breakfasts. Sure, there's not a lot in the way of by-the-book crockery and cutlery. Chances are that the cereals , and probably the milk are still in the boxes they came in (not acceptable at any other meal of the day). Diners leap up and down from the table to catch toast at its peak and then each person lapses into happy concentration. Each attends neurotically to the exact level of milk absorption, sogginess and sugar in cereal, the perfect combination of colour, carbonisation, crispness, temperature, butter thickness and degree of melting.

By any objective standard, this is pretty odd behaviour yet it is completely acceptable in even the most behaviourally hidebound families. Even the breakfast at a traditional country house weekend was a help-yourself affair with diners digging into the chafing dishes and even, if Mrs Beeton is to be believed, boiling their own eggs in a copper saucepan over a spirit lamp. This has always astounded me. These are the kind of people who, without staff to turn down their beds would paw impotently at the taught counterpane, entirely unable to get in. It calls to mind the elderly Duke who couldn't work out why his toothbrush didn't go all foamy when his butler was away, never, to coin a phrase, having squeezed his own tube.

Which brings up some interesting diversions. Undoubtedly, toast and egg boiling require precise judgement and can conform to an infinite spectrum of personal idiosyncracy, but the British Fried Breakfast, it becomes apparent, is technologically idiot proof. Even the most Neanderthal cook cannot bugger up a fried breakfast. Once all the ingredients have been checked onto the plate the worst thing you can say about it is that it's greasy. Of course it's greasy, that's the point.

It's a triumph of marketing to manage the consumer's expectations to that degree. Imagine if one of the big fast food chains could manage it... McBurgers - they're crap and they'll kill you! ...people would flee the formica temple. Yet the breakfast lives on. The correct combination of low spec ingredients stewed in anything that passes as oil will be happily wolfed by aficionados.

Maybe Ray Kroc's great discovery is the answer. Maybe people have a fundamental need for touchstones of consistency in their lives. Perhaps the need is greatest at times of weakness, like early in the morning or when hungover. We've managed to evolve a meal that either anyone can replicate for themselves or that no one else can screw up for them.

I suppose everyone can remember one perfect breakfast. I've done yoghurt in an olive grove, fresh croissants pre-dawn in Les Halles and even a short stack watching the sun come up over Santa Monica Boulevard but there is one that really sticks out.

I must have been about sixteen and had been invited by an impossibly posh girl, to a hunt ball. About twenty of us were to stay in beautiful Georgian farmhouse in the wilds of Dorset with notably absent parents. I remember a night of awesome drinking, impossibly exciting bed hopping and satiated sleep - without doubt, the perfect groundwork for God's own breakfast.

Due to some poor curtain work I was awakened at first light and, finding my bedmate, unfiltered through alcohol, a slightly less appealing option than hitherto, headed down to the kitchen.

Normally, I find Agas pointless, sometimes even offensive. Statements of conspicuous consumption are fairly irritating at the best of times, but when they weigh over a ton, come in Habitat 1972 colourways and don't actually do the job they're supposedly designed for - well I think you're going to have to be pretty attached to your rosy vision of the domestic idyll to struggle daily with a inefficient piece of Edwardian technology just to heat beans.

My grandmother blackleaded a great bastard like that once a week and fell to her knees and thanked God and Nye Bevan the day she got her two ring Baby Belling. They're good, I suppose, for warming your arse and drying the black Labrador, the only things you couldn't do better in a microwave (though now I think about it...).

On this particular Sunday morning, though, the sight of an eight burner range, freestanding on a 300 yr old stone flagged floor kissed by low, misty sunlight from the window overlooking the paddock... well, what's a boy to do?

Fortunately we'd stocked up. Two large cardboard boxes held enough high cholesterol ingredients to fur the arteries of an aircraft carrier.

Should you ever find yourself in such glorious conditions -which is, of course, impossible - this is the procedure to follow.

Tea is the essential first step. The kitchen will obviously contain one of those huge 'Brown Betty' teapots with the second handle over the spout that was standard issue to the WRVS, can fortify a whole NAAFI or a blitzed terrace and thus won the war. (If Gibraltar can get a medal, the Brown Betty must be due a sadly posthumous VC). Tea will come in the surprising form of dried brown leaves and will be found in a tin or 'caddy'. Put quite a lot in, then some more, then pour on boiling water. The resulting brew won't taste like anything you're used to. It will probably stain your teeth and have the strangely astringent effect of shrivelling your stomach to the size and consistency of a walnut. Oddly, no matter how much milk you pour in, it will all ways remain the same orange colour of a Las Vegas lounge singer. Only antimatter can absorb so much of something else without change.

Tea, though, has a miraculous effect on waking drunks. If applied swiftly enough it can stun the drinker into a state of quiet contemplation, head in hands at the table. This soothes tempers, covers the embarrassment of waking up with a different person and, most importantly, keeps everyone out of the way while you ply the pans.

Set up the oven for keeping things warm and get the plates in early. This helps with getting everything au point and causes hours of amusement as the cripplingly hungover sear themselves to the hot china.

Large iron pans, not unlike two foot diameter balti buckets have been the utensil of choice for breakfast pros since the beginning of time. Research trips to caravans in laybys, mess tents, galley's and greasy spoons have proved this conclusively. The only variance from the norm I've ever encountered was a standup nosherie in a railway arch on Bristol Docks that favoured the bottom three inches chopped from a 56 gallon oil drum. By the taste of the fried egg bap, they'd kept the original oil too.

To digress momentarily: This was the same place that poured dockers tea from an urn, pre-milked (UHT) and sugared to enamel endangering sweetness into one pint jam jars. They kept three chipped and unmatched mugs for managers, passers-by and the impossibly effete.

Back to our pan. Thomas Harris, the man who made us aware of how good human liver might taste with some fava beans and a nice chianti, knows a thing or two about cookery. In 'Hannibal', our eponymous hero taunts Clarice over the care she lavishes on her old iron skillet. There's a lovely image of the oiled base as a dark mirror. It's the sort of foodie moment that completely endears you to a book. Sadly, in the case of our breakfast, it's entirely superfluous. You don't need a great pan because you're going to use a lot of oil.

Of course there are huge differences of opinion on this. Personally I favour something light and flavourless with a high smoke point. Groundnut is particularly good. Some favour lard - gets hotter and kills you quicker - and others recovered bacon fat from the last breakfast. One of my grandmothers used to keep a breakfast pan for a fortnight at a time, allowing the bacon and sausage fat to congeal each morning and building strength and flavour until the inevitable complaint of rancidity caused her to scrape it into an old copy of the Sunday People and bin it. Perhaps it's because her husband, my grandfather, finally passed over from congestive heart failure that I am content to allow the bacon to lightly flavour a more healthy oil which (sound of rolling in graves) I only use once.

Crucial, though, is the quantity. There are devices on the market which enable you to spray a light coating of oil onto the pan. There is even a model in my own possession which guarantees '1 Cal per spritz'. I know... awful thought isn't it? It's important to remember that sausages need to be stewed slowly in the oil for best results and that a fried egg can only be perfect if there's enough oil in the pan to splash over the top to set the surface of the yolk.

In American kitchens, cooking fat is called 'grease'. Says it all really doesn't it?

So, with tea on the go, oven warm and plates heating up, put enough oil in the pan to worry your doctor (between .5cm and 1cm), heat it up an slip in the sausages.

Of sausages there is much to say - fortunately, not all of it here. Contents are largely a matter of taste. I find the average cheapo English banger a rusk stuffed travesty. It has all the artificial, pink over blown charm of a gymbound 'roid monster. Some of the specialist, hand made versions of same are better, the estimable 'Porkinson' banger for example, but I find myself tending towards pork and apple or even venison. For some reason, the beef sausage seems just plain wrong.

Whatever happens the links should be separated and slid into the oil without piercing. The oil should be hot enough to stew but not fry the link. The oil should utter a contented sigh as the sausage slides in - and there we shall draw a discrete veil over this image.

After about half an hour the bangers should be looking good and can be rescued from the oil, drained, blotted on kitchen paper and laid peacefully to rest in the warm oven where they'll quietly improve as things get frenetic around the burners. Health Nazis may find total oil immersion beyond the pale and thus fear the sausage. There are several responses a) they shouldn't be reading this b) a sausage contains at least 25% unalloyed pork fat, if any vegetable oil remains in the banger it can only have the net effect of making it more healthy and c) who cares?
That said, for the remaining elements of the breakfast less oil will be required. Pour out all but a light coating and raise the heat in preparation for the bacon.

In every country where its consumption is not religiously or culturally forbidden, there are specialised pork products that are a source of intense national pride. Prosciutto, Serrano, Parma, Virginia hams, speck, salami, Pied Negro, rillettes the list could go on indefinitely and pleasureably - at least it could anywhere but England. In this country, our proud history of pork butchery has atrophied to the loathsome 'sausages' we've already dismissed and imported, fish fed, water pumped artificially smoke flavoured 'bacon'. It's obviously not necessary to go to insane gastronomic lengths for the bacon in your fry up but it is important to find something that won't hit the pan and immediately render down into half a pint of sugary water and s thin strip of unidentifiable protein.

Although back bacon was always seen as the luxurious option by our parents' generation it is in the streaky rasher that heaven lies. The thick fillet in back bacon all too often ends up tasting like the sole of an espadrille. As with all meat, flavour is dependent on the 'marbling', the degree to which fat interleaves the connective tissue. A properly cooked streaky rasher is thus perfect and a beautiful thing in the sight of God. In the ceremony of coronation the most sacred moment is the anointing of the brow of the sovereign with holy oil or 'chrysm'. This is the point at which confirms the connection of the secular to the divine. The streaky rasher also yields a quantity of voluptuous and highly flavourful grease which touches with its benediction all of the remaining ingredients.