By John Kirkendall
My wife and I were walking down Kensington in London and happened to hear a woman explaining to her husband: “This morning, dear, you need a proper English breakfast.”
It turned out we, too, were looking for a place for breakfast.
It seemed OK to simply follow them into this very English restaurant.
We experienced English breakfasts on earlier stints to London and this particular morning seemed like a perfect time to augment our experience.
We found that the sine qua non of the English breakfast is a half tomato, usually broiled, sometimes fried, sometimes with Parmesan cheese on top.
That is accompanied by English bacon.
There are those who rave about this product, some even claiming it surpasses the American version in taste and meatiness. I, for one, do not fall in that category of persons.
I genuinely prefer a thick sliced American product.
But, if curiosity is getting the better of you, I spotted a website that gives you the lowdown.
Britishbacon.com has the products and explanations that may interest you.
It also echoes my fascination with just what an English breakfast consists of.
Some of the contents of the plate may be somewhat jolting to you in the morning.
Examples are the baked beans and the fried mushrooms.
I think of baked beans as an accompaniment to spare ribs or something along with potato salad to have at a casual outing.
Breakfast?
Nothing ventured, nothing gained — we ploughed ahead (as the English would say) and had the works. The works also included bangers, a word for link sausages in England.
I must admit those were interesting as well and quite tasty, depending on the restaurant you choose.
These are as varied in ingredients as the place you select to have your breakfast.
Nevertheless, a good complement to the accompanying eggs.
Eggs will typically be fried, generally sunny side up, or scrambled. No need to worry about seeing Eggs Benedict on the menu.
Toast is a rather indifferent affair, served with butter and orange marmalade and arrives at the table in a holder my friend calls a toast cooler.
Toast must be difficult for a restaurateur — it cools quickly and attempts to cover it to keep it warm result in limp slices that are particularly unappealing.
I think if I owned a breakfast spot, I would have a toaster at each table for guests to deal with as they wished — an idea borrowed from the Japanese who have the grill on the table so
guests can do their food preparation.
Don’t worry too much about ordering juice.
At least at this place the orange juice, hopefully designated as such, tasted very much like the Donald Duck canned juice I remember growing up.
I am sure other dining spots have wonderfully fresh juices since they are so close to where beautiful fruit is grown.
The place we followed our anonymous leaders into was not such a spot.
Once your American “accent” is detected, coffee will arrive forthwith.
The proper English breakfast will look something like this on the plate:
The toast will be in the middle of the plate, the eggs on the toast, covered with the mushrooms, the English bacon, and bangers and beans will be alongside the toast.
Have plenty of additional toast and marmalade ready and pass the HP Sauce.
The sauce apparently is a revered staple, consumed by the queen as liberally as mustard is on a hot dog at an American ball park.
We found this addition a little quirky, to be honest. Like having ketchup on scrambled eggs.
It works for some and not for others.
There is a certain amount of sticker shock when dining in London.
Our breakfast was roughly $60 for the two of us and we still had lunch and dinner to go.
But you really can’t put a price on such experiences — at least if you have sufficient funds to get home to start saving for your next adventure.
We found the people to be genuinely friendly, eager to assist and with those accents, sounding so terribly cultured.
Off to the museums: so much to see before having a Ploughman’s Lunch at an inviting pub.
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Judge John Kirkendall is a retired Washtenaw County Probate judge. He has taught cooking classes for more than 25 years at various cooking schools in the Ann Arbor area and has himself attended classes at Cordon Bleu and La Varenne in Paris, as well as schools in New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.
