Full English

 Breakfast, that is. (Or Welsh, Scottish or Irish, wherever you happen to be) 

One of the delights of travelling in this country - and there are still a few - is the chance of a cooked breakfast. I can never resist, although I don't always go for the whole thing, if it is a buffet where you chose your own. But always at least bacon and tomatoes. 

The 'traditional' breakfast now is a core of bacon, sausage, egg, then tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, hash browns or some other potato ingredient and black pudding for the very resolute. (I do eat it, more so now since the anaemia, as I think it must be good for me.) Fried bread might make an appearance, although its place seems to have been largely usurped by the hash browns - and then everything garnished with red and brown sauce. And of course, toast, either deathly pale or on fire, in one of those strange revolving hotel toasters, with or without marmalade. Fancy stuff, like cereal, muffins and croissants, juice, yoghurt and fruit are really the realm of the 'Continental' for the purist. 

I was wondering, as one does, when that ingredient list became the expectation. In earlier times, if historical fiction is accurate,  a cut off a ham, or a sirloin and small beer might be more likely for a gentleman, with bread and butter for the ladies. Possibly with home made preserves. And for us hoi polloi some sort of gruel or porridge or bread and scrape. 

I'm guessing that the classic full breakfast began to evolve in the days of country houses and Golden Age fiction, when there were still plenty of servants to cook and carry it all and a lot of produce would have come from the kitchen garden and home farm and would have been seasonal - not many tomatoes in the winter. Even then kidneys, kedgeree and kippers (all the Ks) would have had a place alongside the sausage. One of the pleasure of reading Agatha Christie era mysteries is those country house breakfasts with those massive silver domed serving platters. There must have been quite a bit of waste - although I expect the servants got a share, and in those days, the pigs. Which makes for a kind of circle which I'm not sure I want to think about!  For some reason heroes always seemed to eat kidneys. Not my idea of breakfast. 

The full breakfast has got into my mind from recent stays in London and the RNA Conference at Royal Holloway. I do have a favourite London Breakfast place - a posh hotel where the buffet has things like chai pudding and confit tomatoes. The hotel has got a bit expensive for me now, but I can still go there for the occasional breakfast, as they are quite happy to serve non residents. A bit of an indulgence, but worth it when I want to feel special.