A conservative breakfast - the proper traditional breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and beverage - Column

National Review, August 23, 1993 by Digby Anderson

The English have largely abandoned the traditional cooked breakfast. The wives are too lazy and churlish to cook it. Their husbands and children are too lazy to get up in time to eat it. In addition, all of them gullibly swallow the propaganda of assorted food faddists and health fascists. So they spoon up mixtures of grey cardboard, sawdust, and skimmed milk before they slouch off to the office, school, or unemployment-handout center. This mixture, they believe, will make them go to the lavatory, banish heart disease, and guarantee that they live forever. Why such a lazy people should want to do something as energetic as live forever is a mystery.

Many Americans have apparently kept the cooked breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, sausage, and fried (pre-boiled) potatoes. They are to be congratulated. But only a little, for what they have kept is only the appearance. Their breakfasts are a sham. They too are lazy, especially when it comes to shopping for the right ingredients. Take the first word in the above description, "fried." Frying imparts taste because of the changes that occur when foods are cooked at the temperature it makes possible. But also, and crucially, the frying medium gives its own taste especially to eggs and potatoes. Breakfast must be cooked in meat fat. Bacon fat is the norm. Po@k fat will do. Goose and duck fat are excellent. Chicken fat is very good too. I like pheasant fat. The conservative kitchen always has plenty of all of these because its cook prepares lots of bacon, geese, and chickens, and keeps the fat. If you do not and thus don't have good fat and won't obtain it any other way, then don't even try to prepare a cooked breakfast. It will be a sham, a lie, a cheat. Eat cardboard instead - for an eternity.

Eggs should be fresh, but their freshness matters much less than their taste, which depends on what the hens or ducks have eaten. Hens and ducks left to range free will eat grass, worms, insects, seeds, and household scraps, including meat fat, which they love. Indeed my hens' eggs used faithfully to remind me of what I had had for dinner two nights before: "Is there a hint of snapper in your egg today, dear? We must have thrown the heads out for the hens." With hens, small eggs are better than big ones: there is more yolk to white. So eat four pullets' eggs rather than two large hens' eggs. Goose eggs make a good serving, about four times a hen's egg. Duck eggs have the best flavor. Turkey eggs are also good. Eggs must never be turned over in the cooking. In this, as in most matters of taste, there is no choice. They should be fried in a lot of fat, which can be spooned over the top to ensure it is hot.

Proper bacon is difficult to obtain in both the U.S. and England. The pre-sliced is cut far too thin. Sliced or not, the modern cures are far too sweet. Worst of all, most bacon contains large amounts of water. When it hits the pan, this gushes out and the bacon steams rather than fries. Moreover the water contains chemicals which stick to the bottom of the pan so that when you fry your eggs after the bacon, the eggs stick to the pan and break. If you can't find good bacon, cure your own. Smoking may be too complicated, but it is not difficult to make uncured bacon in a wet cure of salt, saltpeter, and flavoring. Look up a recipe in any old cookery book. I haven't the time or space. Anyway I can't do everything for you. Use some initiative, for goodness' sake.

But I have described in a previous column how to make your own sausages, and no doubt you are all doing this now. That leaves the potatoes. Always start from scratch. Boil the potatoes in their skins - floury ones if they are to be mashed and fried, firm if they are to be sliced and fried. Let them cool, take off the skins, and fry the potatoes. You might try the modem English version of "bubble and squeak," potatoes mashed with cooked greens and fried and turned again and again for some twenty minutes till it is very reduced and browned in and out. Or the old version which, of course, included leftover roast meat, usually beef.

Toast, I will deal with another day. What passes for it on most tables I am not up to describing now. But what should you drink with breakfast? The Spanish don't have much to teach Anglo-Saxons about what to eat for breakfast, though their tostadas spread with pork fat are all right in an emergency. But you can still see them drinking very large brandies for breakfast. So why not us? We are always being told we live in a multicultural society. Let's start the day the multicultural way.