Menus, November 6, 2013

To eat well in England, you should have breakfast

three times a day.

W. Somerset Maugham

Did you know that institution otherwise known as The Full English Breakfast (after only a few hours of research, I can assure you that it deserves to be spoken of in capital letters) has an entire society devoted to it's preservation? 

And not in the creepy Miss Havisham preserve a meal
by letting it fossilize way.

There's a society logo and everything, so you know it's for real. Because I could not make up this logo. Well, I could, but I didn't :

An entire group of people committed to celebrating and maintaining
the traditions of a single meal.
 I want to go to those meetings.
I wonder what they serve.

We in this country have traditional meals, of course- the cornbread vs. white bread stuffing and jellied vs. whole berry cranberry sauce food fights of Thanksgiving are only weeks away. But the Full Breakfast isn't a yearly meal- 

this was once a daily event.

If you had lived in Britain generations ago, you too may have started the day by getting on the outside of 1200 of the most sustaining calories around, because stoking the furnace with a hearty breakfast was a good idea in a time when the day's chore list looked like this: 

All that breakfast energy is probably what gave the intrepid British the strength to spend a century or so colonizing a large portion of the world-just look at this amazing map! The areas in pink are those places that were at one time in the history of the planet British colonies:

It is possible, of course, that this compulsion to explore and conquer new territories was prompted by a deep desire (breakfast having been eaten) to discover
 somewhere where someone might be cooking something interesting for dinner.

The English Breakfast may be the stuff of legend, but it's not the stuff of all day long.

The Home Audience, who has been in England for 60 meals or so, has yet to feast on The Full English, but he has dined on curries, pizzas, kababs, lasagnas, Chinese takeaway and on one of  Britannia's great contributions to the world of dinner, fish and chips.  All that interesting multicultural cuisine  made me wonder what it is that makes British food British. And that, quite naturally, made me wonder what was for dinner.  

Wednesday: Fish and Chips and peas

Baked Fish and Chips. Is that a sacrilege? The recipe comes from the UK edition of Family Circle magazine, which gives it some authenticity, but if you'd prefer to eat your fish and chips covered with the more traditional crispy batter (and really, if health weren't an issue, isn't that what we'd all prefer?) try this recipe for beer battered fish and chips. There are apparently some vegetative things called mushy peas, and the recipe says that they are an essential part of a genuine fish and chips experience. Of course I looked them up, and they are perhaps not as weird as they sound to American ears.  Think thick split pea soup without the ham- which to these American ears, actually sounds pretty good.

Thursday:  Spinach and Egg Pizzettes 

Here's a recommendation from Smitten Kitchen, whose amazing author remembers this little spinach and egg treat as one of her favorite meals in England. I'll be using a batch of no-knead bread dough for the crust (note to self: stir up the dough on Wednesday night) (other note to self: buy some pita bread or a frozen or refrigerated pizza crust in case you forget previous note to self). Carbs, dark leafy greens and protein are all together in one happy golden circle here, but if you need a heartier meal, think of pairing this with a bowl of tomato soup or a pork chop.

Friday: Lamb Roast and Vegetables

The BBC has a cooking site! Wow! This exciting discovery comes just in time for the homecoming of the Home Audience, and the traditional meal of homecoming in this household, Roast Lamb. Carrots, onions, chunks of winter squash and tomatoes will roast along with the lamb. No potatoes for us tonight- the potatoes are being saved for tomorrow. Do those crazy metric measurements strike the fear of 5th grade math class into your soul? Never fear! Here's a handy dandy conversion chart that should get us all through the metric muddle.

Saturday:  Shepherd’s Pie

The internet and Gordon Ramsay agree: a real shepherd's pie is made with lamb, not beef. A beef based shepherd's pie ought to be called (and people get very insistent on this) a cottage pie. Which is just silly. If a shepherd's pie is made from the animals tended by shepherds, why isn't its beefy cousin called a cowboy pie? I mean, I can understand why it's not called a cow pie, but by shepherd's pie logic, shouldn't a cottage pie be made of little houses,or made of  little people who live in little houses?

Anyway. This recipe uses last night's leftover lamb and will include carrots, spinach, peas and any other leftover vegetable that's hiding out in the fridge. Extra mashed potatoes turn into something really fun tomorrow.

Sunday: English Breakfast: Sausage, Eggs, Tattie scones and mushrooms 

Well, maybe not the Full Breakfast. Maybe not the baked beans. Although, why not? Sausages,  eggs, a can of baked beans, fried mushrooms and scones made from mashed potatoes. Potatoes get nicknamed tatties, mixed with a very few other ingredients and become..... Tattie scones! That is the funnest thing to say that I've learned in a long time, and they look as fun to make and eat as they are to say. Be warned, the scones made in Britain are not much like the supersweet things we call scones in America. A British scone is like an American biscuit, and a British biscuit is an American cookie, and things just get more linguistically confusing from there, so let's stop while we can all still believe that we speak the same language.

I'll decide later just how much of this breakfast will actually make it to dinner-

For now