I. Imagining the full English breakfast
Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.
Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.
But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.
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2 comments:
Just a little comment as your breakfast splurges onto my imagination. At first I wondered if the double post was significant and I conclude not. I have yet to make a complete textual comparison but there is no immediate difference that could carry code so I leave it aside. I recall those comic breakfasts too. I mentioned them to Ella and Lottie the other week: How my mother had promised to treat me to a breakfast like Desparate Dan, all high mash on the plate and sausages sticking out at the right places to make the mound complete. When my dinner came there was the mash there were the sausages but it would have taken twenty servings to get close to Dan's meal and I never forgot that moment. Ella and Lottie to my surprise got the story and bring it up when we eat now. Of course this was dinner not breakfast but it is a sausage tale. Now your tale is a tale too because I've sat and fed you real sausages till you groaned and you still asked for more and bacon so I can only conclude that drink has addled your mind and (not or) that Holly wrote this under your name. Well done Hols.
Here the sausage story - forgive me going off the point but hard luck or ban me - is that they are good. Really and expensively good. We get them from markets where the poultry Kate has its head still on and they sell rabbits from their cages to the table. The sausages lose no water. Excuse that diversion. Over now.
I'll do a breakfast for you if you will permit. I'll post it on my blog and put an comment link to it.
I remember rolling sosmix sausages with a woman in the Dordogne once. She fed them to her children after. She didn't care that they were burned and/or soft on the inside. She just mixed and cooked. I recall falling briefly in love with that mix of fingers, children and carefree culinary approach.
Hi Tim Ingrid wrote the breakfast piece for me as a commision I didn't say this in the post as I was inspired by your reference to Authers so thought I'd just stick it up there - she has written a second piece while eating breakfast which I will post tommorow but for today you will have to make do with a becoming sausage - and as Mike Yarwood used to say "And now this Is Me"
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