The Joy of Small Things: breakfast in a café
By Paul Richards
Is there anything dirtier than a slice of fried bread?
Like an inverted crucifix, the ‘fried slice’ takes everything good and righteous and turns it upside down. A nice slice of sourdough? No, make it a slice of white, preferably slightly stale, mass-produced, pre-sliced cardboard.
A spread rich in omega oils and polyunsaturated fat? No thanks, I want the bread to soak up an unholy mix of meat fats from the bottom of the pan. The stuff that you can’t pour down the sink because it blocks the pipes? Yes, I want that in my tum.
Obviously, you can’t have a fried slice on its own. That would be reckless. It should be the cornerstone of a cooked breakfast that can include any or each of the following: bacon, sausage, black pudding, fried eggs, bubble and squeak, fried tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms, and lots of toast.
There is a doctrinal schism over elements of this. Some say a ‘hash brown’ has no more place in a cooked breakfast than a dollop of Ben & Jerry’s. Others assert that baked beans are the work of Beelzebub. Black pudding, a foodstuff made from blood and fat, is a clogged artery too far for some. Others insist that without chips, it doesn’t count as a Full English.
And that brings us to nomenclature. A ‘Full English’ is impossible to find in Glasgow, Cardiff or Belfast. National pride kicks in. It’s a ‘full Scottish’ (square sausage, tattie scones) a ‘full Welsh’ (brecwast llawn Cwmreig) or an ‘Ulster Fry’ (potato farls or fried soda bread). You can ask for ‘the Full Monty’, which legend suggests is named after Field Marshal Montgomery who started his day with bacon, eggs and the rest. He lived until he was 88; if the Afrika Corps couldn’t kill him, saturated animal fats weren’t going to either. If you just ask for a ‘fry-up’ you won’t go far wrong.
This all suggests you are ordering your fry-up in a traditional café, rather than cooking at home, and of course this is the right place to do so. I appreciate the grandeur of a cooked breakfast at the Wolseley on Piccadilly, or at the Reform, or some other wood-panelled, opulent (and pricey) venue. Personally, I judge one of the best breakfasts in town to be served at Portcullis House in the Houses of Parliament, if you can avoid the abomination of them sticking all the ingredients in a wrap. But it is not the same as the experience of a traditional café. This is yet another small joy we are currently denied.
The traditional café gets called a ‘greasy spoon’ but never by me — that would be sacrilegious. It is here, in a place like the Shepherdess Café on the corner of City Road and Shepherdess Walk in the East End, or the famous Regency Café in Pimlico, that your breakfast tastes just a little better. Traditional tiles, formica table tops, the smell of toast and bacon. You can still see the tomato-shaped sauce bottle and glass sugar dispenser. They are filled with tables of folk who, it turns out, do not run the country, but make the country run: builders, delivery drivers, binmen, plumbers, NHS workers, and cabbies.
At the Regency, famous for the scene in Layer Cake where Morty tips boiling tea over the grass who landed him a stretch in chokey, you have to pay and order at the counter. Then you take a table and wait. When your number is up (at a decibel level that can knock down walls), you fetch your plate from the counter. It’s an arcane system but it works. The queue that stretches out of the door, a juxtaposition of suited civil servants and workers in hi-viz, is testament to the tastiness of the food.
From West End to East End — E. Pellici’s on Bethnal Green Road has been serving up a full English since 1900, and the same family run it today. Uniquely, the café has an engraved wood interior, installed in 1946, and Grade II listed. Like much of the neighbourhood, there is a link to the Kray twins, who ate their bacon and eggs here before committing murder and mayhem. With a nod to their Italian heritage, there’s home-made minestrone and chicken rusticana on the lunch menu. Like so much else in our British culture, we can thank generations of families from Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and elsewhere for our Full English.
Every neighbourhood has a traditional café with an ‘all day breakfast’. They may have buckled to changing tastes, with offers of eggs benedict or muesli. And yes, you can put together a reasonable veggie Full English with halloumi, bubble and squeak, eggs, beans, tomatoes and a vegetarian sausage. But the Full English, dripping in fat and high in salt, washed down with tannic-flavoured tea or coffee you can stand your spoon up in, remains a central part of our shared culture, like the Beatles or queuing. When they let us out, let us head for a café and share a dirty slice of heaven.
Next time: The Joy of Small Things — the second-hand bookshop
Paul Richards is a writer-for-hire.
