Big British and Irish Breakfasts

That’s him. Ty. Was driving me mad because Lineker’s name kept intruding. I thought at the time his passing was strange.

Including the UK, which has done so for most of my 71 years (although you do still see some recipes which also include pounds/ounces - buit it looks strange to see it).

FWIW, I’ve always regarded Rhodes as the early driver of “Modern British” cuisine. He was cooking it well before the internationally known chefs, like Fergus Henderson, of the St John restaurant, started.

And, yes, I reckon it must have been an insufficiently hot pan that caused the failure of the toad.

1 Like

Slater tweets, too. https://twitter.com/nigelslater

I like Nigel Slater and Felicity Cloake a lot

2 Likes

I see his tweets are all links to his Observer column. We get a print copy newspaper at the weekend - the Guardian on Saturday and it’s sister paper the Observer on Sunday (left of centre politics, doncha know). Guardian comes with its “Feast” supplement - lots of recipes including from Cloake and restaurant reviews from Grace Dent. Sunday brings Slater and reviews from Jay Rayner (and a monthly food supplement). Takes me a while to get moving at a weekend with all that reading to get through.

4 Likes


Alice’s Kitchen, Sea Bright, NJ

7 Likes

Nice looking breakfast, coldbeer. Even without the mention of where it was from, I’d have guessed an American offering. It’s the fried eggs which appear to be of the “over” variety - not something you’d generally find in either the UK or Ireland where our fried eggs are invariably what Americans call “sunny side up”.

2 Likes

Mediocre Full English at a pub called Hugs and Sarcasm in Toronto last summer . Very slow service.

Pretty good Scotch Breakfast at House on Parliament (pub) in Toronto’s Cabbagetown.
image

House on Parliament’s Scotch Egg made into a brunch main with Hollandaise. (Mediocre taters)

When we have patio weather, I’ve been visiting various pubs in Ontario that offer Full Breakfasts on patios.

Most patios are still closed. The Caledonian in Toronto has a heated patio that opened recently, but I will have to check if they’re open for Brunch.

5 Likes

I am embarrassed to admit I ordered them that way. Alice is from Donegal and probably prepared them thusly under protest.

Nah.The menu says “eggs (any style)”. It’s just you don’t get any choice over it in the UK - in most cases, breakfast comes a fried egg. You need somewhere upmarket, like hotels, to get an offer of scrambled or poached.

1 Like

I’ve always been perplexed by a breakfast I had in Inverness. I guess I thought I would get fried ham and sliced cheese to make a sandwich. Is it common in the UK? As you can see my sister had the full Scottish.

5 Likes

Absolutely not.

You may well see the ingredients - ham, cheese, tomato - on a hotel buffet. But I’ve never anything like that before in this country. I have had something like this in Spain once.

Can you recall how they described it? My guess is that was created for Scandanavian or other North European tourists

Very interesting. You may be correct about the Scandanavian influence. Before I posted I went to their website to see if the menu was still there and it was not. I was looking for something light and as I recall it listed some kind of ham, I think cheddar cheese and tomatoes. It was rather vague, I should have asked the waitress.

Might be more common in the Polish households, or mixed British & Polish households in Britain :slight_smile: On Instagram, I had been following the account of an English chef with a Polish wife somewhere not too far from the Peak District, and the meals inside their house had a strong Mitteleuro influence. That might be at play at some hotels, when the kitchen staff are from Central or Eastern Europe.

It’s particularly odd to see the cheese grated. Here, and certainly in a wider Europe, I’ve never seen other than slices or chunks.

1 Like

There’s a real difference between the north and south of England when it comes to cheese. You couldn’t get a cheese sandwich made with slices from Bath to Penzance when I was in England a few years ago. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it on a plate like that. Grated cheese sandwiches are really annoying to eat. On another note, if you can find Cornish Yarg in the shops, give it a try. It’s really nice. Especially sliced.

1 Like

Can be. On the other hand, before I retired, a regular bought sandwich had grated cheese and grated carrot, bound with a little mayo. Really nice, the carrot giving a contrasting sweet crunch.

3 Likes

Re grated cheese for sandwich/bread. First time seeing something like this.

The (interesting) things we see in others’ travel photos.

Interestingly, the only breakfast I had in Amsterdam was bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and bread from the hotel buffet.

3 Likes

I have a memory of a savoury Pannenkoek breakfast (crêpe, but a much bigger portion) , followed by a apple and ginger Pannenkoek, from my trip to Amsterdam.

2 Likes

Yeah, the Dutch do great pancakes. I remember one from many years back. Two pancakes served flat with thin slices of fried apple between them. Which neatly leads me on to Britain’s answer to the Dutch breakfast pancake - the Staffordshire oatcake.

Thicker than a normal British pancake but much thinner than an American one. They originate from the city of Stoke and are very much a regional food. I can buy them in my supermarket and we’re about 35 miles from the city.

Here’s something of the social history of the oatcake which, if it is ever to regain its greater popularity it probably needs a new name- the Potteries Wrap, perhaps.

In this house, it get warmed under the grill, with a sprinkle of cheddar. That’s it at its most basic but it’s quite happy being wrapped round and other elements of the Full English. I doubt whether baked beans would be a great success, although sausage and omelette certainly is.

2 Likes