Answering the Most Important Question About the British Fry-Up
Credit to Author: Scott Oliver| Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2019 14:01:17 +0000
A great many national certainties have been upturned during these turbulently populist times, yet one thing that has remained is the British/English love of a fry-up in the morning. There’s a clue in the name: full English breakfast (FEB). Take Strictly Come Dancing competitor and former cricketer Graeme Swann, who once said that the five components of his hypothetical “Desert Island Salad” would be: “Eggs, bacon, sausage, beans and chips (can I have brown sauce too?).”
There is perhaps no greater connoisseur of the FEB than Alan Partridge – if not the quintessential Englishman, then certainly occupying a small corner of the English psyche where we like to reserve our most strident opinions for trivial matters. Thus, with each new day bringing fresh hell in the national destiny, we displace our anxieties onto frivolous concerns. A coping strategy. Unable to make sense of anything, we venture Strong Opinions about The Dress or what the way you hang your loo-roll reveals about your personality. Or the FEB.
For some, the sight of baked beans served in a ramekin – much less the whole thing “dished up” in a jar – signals the final, irrefutable proof of the decline of a once great Empire. It is hipsterisation or maybe gentrification gone mad – either way, a corruption of our very identity.
The positioning of the beans on the plate was of course a topic of some interest to Alan Partridge (although, by smuggling his Big Plate into the Travel Tavern’s all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, he had a little more latitude than most in that respect). Thus, smacking his lips having wolfed down “the best full English breakfast [he’d] had since Gary Wilmot’s wedding”, lovingly prepared by his Anglophile Russian girlfriend Sonja, Alan adds an important caveat: “Minor criticism: more distance between the eggs and the beans. I may want to mix them, but I want that to be my decision. Use the sausage as a breakwater.”
Is this just Alan being a fusspot – perhaps even tacitly pro-ramekin – or is he, by zeroing in on the engineering utility of the sausage, on to some deep psychological or anthropological truth, one expressed through the medium of the arrangement of the core components of the full English breakfast on the plate? Important questions, now more than ever…
The first person I turned to regarding whether or not you should use the sausage as a breakwater between the beans and the egg was Ivy League Psychology professor Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, the world’s leading expert on disgust. Although unfamiliar with the whole beans/egg problematic, Professor Rozin remarked that it had its analogue in the kosher tradition’s prohibition of contact between meat and milk, since “unlike instances where one acceptable food is contaminated by touching an unacceptable one – a cockroach or piece of faeces, say – here, both foods are edible, although of course there’s no cultural prohibition against the mixing of baked beans and egg. At least, none that I’m aware of.”
Dave Stevens, head chef at The Wolseley in Mayfair – for Dr O’Connor, “the best place to have breakfast” – was able to confirm that not only do they serve baked beans, but they do so on the plate. “There are two reasons for that: one, it’s another piece of crockery on the table at breakfast when there’s already a lot going on with a pot of tea or coffee, cups, saucer, toast, etc. The second is it acts like a sauce. And we only use Heinz beans, as they’re the best.”
While the devil-may-care repudiation of Partridgean principles of prandial partitioning is mitigated by the reduced-down viscosity of the beans, the fact that they feature on The Wolseley’s plate confirms them as déclassé food.
Terry’s Cafe in Borough, Southwark, offers what you might call a traditional English breakfast. More caff than café, self-professed “diamond in the rough”, it’s far from being a greasy spoon, given the swank acquired by making Time Out’s top London breakfasts. But it hasn’t forgotten its humble roots, as evidenced by “The Blow-Out” breakfast (otherwise known as a “Graeme Swann Salad”), where a sea of beans laps against the slimy albumen shores of the fried egg. “I’ve had people go, ‘Can I not have the eggs near the beans,'” observes Terry’s proprietor, Austin Yardley. “I go, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I don’t agree with it. It depends whether you’re trying to do a nouveau breakfast or a proper breakfast, where you mop it all up with a slice of bread and butter. That’s the best bit, innit?”
Such promiscuous proximity is endorsed by blogger The Fry-Up Inspector (who, like Partridge, hails from Norwich). “There definitely seems to be an issue with mixing beans and egg according to the followers of my Facebook page,” he says. “I personally don’t mind it, though, as I feel egg and beans go nicely together. When eating a breakfast I always put the beans over the toast or fried bread and then lay the eggs over the top.” The Fry-Up Inspector is also very comfortable with both beans and tomato in his FEB, adding: “The main place I use ketchup is actually on the tomatoes if they are fresh ones, as they often lack enough tomato flavour, especially in the winter months. Brown sauce is excellent on beans, a match made in heaven!”
Yardley does confess to using a ramekin to house the beans in Terry’s Cafe’s mixed grill, but not in their more upmarket breakfast, “The Works” – “nouveau, but not as nouveau as avocado and poached egg” – which includes bubble-and-squeak and black pudding, even a sprinkling of fresh herb. Here, the sausage’s engineering function is less breakwater than bridge, a pork pontoon between the non-contiguous Bean and Egg regions.
But for the Chairman of the English Breakfast Society, Guise Bule, the matter is clear: “I am going to be a little snobby and tell you that any establishment which does not contain beans within a separate container is a greasy spoon wannabe. The only place this is acceptable is at your mother’s table or an authentic greasy spoon from the 1970s,” adding: “English sausage rules the plate and you ask me to reduce it to a mere breakwater? Clearly you are treasonous.”
So there we are: the seas are rising, the breakwaters redundant, the deckchairs on the Titanic being rearranged. And Breakfast does, it seems, mean Breakfast.
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.