I’m currently sitting in China
being cooked fried eggs and ham by our extremely welcoming housemate Wynand. It
reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while.
Something that will no doubt make me hanker for that greasy and pleasant land
again in a few months’ time. Something that no one else does quite as well as
England. Yes, that wonderful symphonic production of morning calorific
exuberance, the English breakfast fry up. What follows will be an exposition of
my love for the art itself, a quick description of what a good fry up consists
of and finally a few reviews of some places I’ve recently tried.
There’s nothing I love more than getting up on
a Saturday morning (or any working week equivalent thereof) and not eating
breakfast for a long time. This probably sounds a bit odd, especially to those
readers who know me. Allow me now to contextualise this a bit. I will patiently
wait until my stomach is growling at me a little, lodging a complaint at the
lack of sustenance, and at that point start preparations for cooking my own fry
up. Either that or I wait until my stomach is behaving more like a pack of
angry wolves and then plot a trajectory to my nearest frying emporium. It is
then time to set off, minding the vague dizziness arising from the pure desire
for pre-noon calories. I often have a partner in this activity and I have to
say my personal favourite is my good friend Dan, he simply understands the
subtleties and more brazen parts of this wonderful fatty assa(u)lt (sorry-I
couldn’t resist). We will walk into the aforementioned purveyor of greasy manna
and peruse the plastic menus, on which there’ll be a selection of set
breakfasts and single fried items. Dan is a true connoisseur and will therefore
inevitably infuriate the short order chef by endlessly customising his order, I
will admittedly often accept his wisdom and swiftly copy him.
How
does the breakfast decision making process proceed? Well, there are the basics.
There must be bacon, eggs, beans and a side order of toast as a bare minimum.
These are the struts on which this great structure is not so delicately
balanced. I then would usually need further pork input in the shape of a
sausage. A word about this sausage (me and Dan have held several working
committees on the subject, usually over an enormous pile of freshly fried
delectation): the sausage should not
be of excellent quality. This is not in keeping with the mood of this
particular symphony. Neither should it be so bad quality as to taste like offal
mixed with shredded wall insulation (you know the ones-the Walls have ears and
all that). It should be of medium low quality, so as to provide adequate offal
resistance and give your jaw the challenge it needs in the morning, but also
not provide too many complex flavours to deal with at this inhuman time of day.
The eggs should be fried with a medium amount of yolk-al wobble, so when the
toast (or chips) is (or are-I am an English teacher after all) inserted it bursts
with a pleasing eruption of golden cholesterol. They should not however risk
giving you salmonella, no golden eruption is worth that. The bacon should again
not be too fancy and, I believe, should not be crispy but more on the back
bacon side of things, arriving with a clear seam of fatty goodness on one side.
Ideally the beans should be Heinz, but this is not essential, the main thing is
they should be in one self-contained pool, possibly bounded by, to paraphrase
Steve Coogan’s Allan Partridge, a breakwater being provided by the sausage.
There should on no account be a tomato sauce inundation occurring, we wouldn’t
want our wonderful orchestra drowned. The toast again should not be
particularly high quality and butter is preferential but alas a rare treat at
your average friary. Now the extras, and these are much more up for debate. Dan
is not a fan of chips, but I think they have their place from time to time and
provide an interesting alternative to soldiers for the eggs-also, a vessel for
salt and vinegar is always welcomed by me, a bit of acetic acid could well stop
immediate heart failure too at this
point. Bubble is another welcome potato based addition, as long as it’s well
made with a good golden crust from frying and some shredded cabbage to add some
sort of illusion of health to this whole affair. I always like fried mushrooms,
but they must be cut up to a good size and fried well (preferably in butter),
until the outsides are sealed but the inside still yield a good juicy reaction
to one’s ravenous bites. Hash browns are the other alternative and they are of
course delicious, though there is not too much to say about them as they are
generally from frozen and are thus pretty homogenous in their quality.
Essentially the carbohydrate element should provide not just sustenance but
also a sponge for all the various liquid like elements of this meal. They
should underpin it, they should provide the bass and percussion section to this
particular experience. One other thing that is always welcome is a fried
tomato-not, I would hasten to add, a gooey pile of tinned plum tomatoes
defiling your plate, and this is wholly
unacceptable. It should be a half tomato fried so that there is a slight hint
of golden crust and a membrane giving way to a delicious vegetable explosion as
you bite into it. A word about beverages: I will always get coffee if it looks
like it won’t be muddy dishwater (have a quick look at their coffee making devices
before ordering), otherwise I will order tea and, because it will probably have
all the subtlety of a brick to the face, soften the blow with a sugar or two.
Delicate Dragon Well tea this is not.
So
there we have it, I hope in its entirety, although I may have missed some bits
out, I’m sure Dan will comment if so. I couldn’t build up your hunger like this
and not give you a few suggestions for where to calm the baying the hounds, so
for those of you in London please have a try of the following four places: The Workers Café (172 Upper Street), Kigi Café
(322 Caledonian Road), Nico’s Café (299 Cambridge Heath Road) and Alpino Café (97 Chapel Market). I went to the
Workers with a friend I’d lived with in China and essentially did it to
reacquaint myself with an old friend called the big breakfast. This breakfast
was neat and well-presented and the service was good, but for me it missed the
point. I want a wobbling mass delightful fried flavours, what I do not want is
lots of white ceramic spaces staring blankly up at me. No, I desire it to be
full to the brim and none too neat, although the components should be clearly defined.
The quality of the food was reasonable and it was by no means a bad breakfast,
just not quite the perfect one for me. The price was pretty reasonable, at
about £5.50 for a big breakfast and coffee (and the coffee was pretty good, the
real stuff-no unmentionable instant atrocities present), but somehow it lacked
the real punch to be a heavyweight breakfast. So, on to Kigi. Kigi has
extremely friendly staff and an amazingly effective short order chef who seems
to work almost solo in the kitchen. Again, their breakfast was pretty neat, a
good size and a good price, this one is a great option by those unfortunate
people who are afraid of grease as it was a lot leaner than the usual
offerings. Again, it had excellent coffee for a friary and also a wealth of Middle
Eastern dishes to choose from-but therein lies the problem for me, they are not
devoted to the way of the frying pan and therefore it comes as no surprise that
there is something lacking. I feel a little bad if this turns you off eating
there, as it is very good value (again, roughly £5.50), the staff were lovely
and the beverages hot and strong, so do give it a go if your tastes are on the
less greasy side. Alpino is another one of the above types of cafes; good food,
nice staff, good coffee, a reasonable price and a big breakfast. Again great,
but something lacking. It will always hold a special place in my heart, though,
for it was my last fry up before moving to China with my girlfriend Celia, a
final punctuation to power me through the challenge of moving eastwards once
again.
For
the real heavyweight you need to go to east London. There, nestling next to
Bethnal Green station, hidden on a noisy junction is an unassuming eatery named
Nico’s. I’d heard tell of this place through legend as professed by Dan, but I
just couldn’t believe such a breakfast could exist. A breakfast that Dan
claimed even seasoned eaters such as us would struggle with. It was therefore
with some excitement and trepidation that I awaited my friend’s arrival on a
drizzly day in this multicultural hub of east London. I’d built myself up for
this one-the hounds were no less than howling for blood in my stomach, and
anyone who knows me knows this is in no way a hyperbolic description. Dan
arrived and we proceeded into the steamy depths of Nico’s. I perused the plastic
menu and was initially slightly concerned as the amount of items didn’t look
like anything special (apart from the two eggs) and at £6.00 was at the more
expensive end of the scale, but if there’s one thing I have faith in it’s Dan’s
ability to display well informed gluttony, treating it as a sort of art form.
So I ordered the desired breakfast, if my memory serves me correctly it was
something like: bacon, eggs, sausage, beans, chips, toast and coffee. I sat
down and waited. A tower of steaming buttered toast arrived. This was
promising. I waited a bit longer, nibbling on a bit of toast by way of a
starter. And there it was. If a plate could groan under the weight of food this
one would be. The first thing that pleased me was that, as if having understood
my psyche, they had chosen a plate which was a little too small, making sure
that this magnum opus was filled to its brim. The sheer quantity was simply
amazing, two eggs, a sausage of just the right low quality, a small hillock of
chips and all between two jaunty speech marks of beans sitting on either side-a
parted sea of beans thus requiring no pork breakwater. “Where is the bacon?” I
hear you cry, a note of desperation no doubt creeping involuntarily into your
voice. This was probably the best part of it. As I made an excavation
(apologies for my mixed metaphors, one simply won’t cover it) down through the
outer breakfast crust I probed for the missing pork seam, and there, as I hit
the plate and had nearly given up hope, there was a curious spongy resistance.
As I parted the top layer of breakfast I discovered that this particular
masterpiece was painted on a canvas of bacon. Yes, the whole bottom of the
plate was covered in this pork manna. What fabulous idea. Cover the entire
plate in bacon and use the bacon to
provide structural integrity of the whole thing! A move of pure creative
engineering genius-had Brunel run a greasy spoon I feel certain he would have
made his breakfasts in such a fashion. What a brilliant conclusion to a perfect
breakfast. And here ends my love letter to the fry up.
