The Full English

Many thanks to Arial Ray for putting things in perspective in yesterday's comments.
Sure, US crimes against food and language are easy targets (and I just love an easy target) but back here in Blighty we too are guilty of some pretty horrendous culinary atrocities and the alleged "full English breakfast" that we thrust on tourists and then go off to giggle in the kitchen is one of the very worst.

Arial's nauseating description of "… the vilest, fattiest bacon and eggs I have ever eaten, and instant tea. Not just any instant tea, instant white tea …" doesn't surprise me in the least as I have witnessed these horrors for myself.

Add to that the English Tourist Board Code of Practice for Abusing Johnny Foreigner:
- All food served to tourists must be at least a week past it's use-by date.
- All vegetables must be boiled until they scream for mercy and then boiled some more.
- Cabbage must be liquid.
- Sprouts must be soggy mush.
- Food that would never be fried in your own home must be fried in stale, gritty grease at high heat so the outside is burnt to a cinder while the inside remains raw.
- What is not overcooked must be undercooked.
- Everything (and that includes pasta dishes, curries, soup, fruit and croissants) must be served with soggy, greasy chips and watered-down tomato ketchup.
- Everything must be caked thickly with salt.
- If a dish looks dry, add a portion of baked beans.
- All desserts must be made entirely from artificial chemicals.
- All tea served to tourists must be weak, pale brown, insipid and flavourless. Use one part tea to four parts sawdust.

Even that sweet little hotel in Bloomsbury where Katie stayed on her visit to London last year served up this crime against breakfast:

Sorry, Katie. I stole it from your blog.
Note the flabby and overcooked fried egg, running with grease;
the tough, cheap, chewy excuse for a bacon rasher;
half a raw tomato (what the fuck is that doing there?);
and of course, the inevitable baked beans.

Note also the thin (ready-sliced catering pack) toast, the awful little pot of over-sweet apricot "preserve" and the dreadfully weak emetic fluid in the teacup.

This is actually pretty decent compared to the slop that gets pushed to most tourists.

So let's redress the balance a little.
Come and have breakfast with Old Dive.

Let's go shopping to start with.
All of these ingredients are local, organic and free range (except the marmalade, which - quelle horreur - is French).
We're in a recession and apparently some fairweather fools are beginning to abandon real food in favour of body-altering chemicals and drugs that are pumped into the agro-chemical-industrial fat/salt/sugar "product" that the supermarkets serve up for a few pennies less.
This is not just fucking dumb stupid, it is criminally insane.
Stop it!
Now!
Buy fresh, local, organic, seasonal, REAL food, or these farmers and suppliers may not be there when the recession is over.
It's only pennies, people; don't be fucking dorks!

So here we have some classic English breakfast ingredients from Harvey's, my local organic emporium.
First up, get a hold of a big ol' frying pan and heat that sucker up.
Add a few drops of organic sunflower oil and smear it around the pan.
No lard.
No greasy "cooking oil".

Old Dive's Full English Breakfast will consist of (per person):
- two lightly fried eggs (good deep, rich yellow runny yolks that burst open and soak the plate with yummy goodness);
- three rashers of unsalted organic bacon;
- three slices of black pudding;
- three lightly-fried lamb's kidneys;
- one huge, flat field mushroom fried until the gills turn black and the top is browning;
- one large, fried pomodoro tomato full of beautiful juice that goes so perfectly with black pudding and flat mushrooms.

A word about mushrooms:
All mushrooms that reach the shops are a minimum of three days old (five for supermarkets) since picking.
These mushrooms are only good for soups and stews.
Any mushroom that begins to dent when pressed hard with a finger (or God forbid is slightly squishy) is no good for breakfast. Soups and stews only, people.

If you do not have a nice patch of woodland and meadow with a secret stash of fungi, then buy your mushrooms at your nearest mushroom farm.
There are three around my own tiny village and all of them have a little hidden counter where Joe Public (or at least those of us in the know) can buy mushrooms picked only minutes earlier for far less than shop prices.
Organic, button, brown, white, flat Portobello, shiitake, oyster; all sorts.
Fresh!

Big, flat, Portobello field mushrooms must be hard and go "clonk" when rapped with a knuckle.
Button mushrooms must be so fresh and crisp that they almost pop when you bite into them.
I always buy a bag of fresh picked buttons to eat like sweets on my way home.
Once you've eaten mushrooms like this you will never, EVER eat soggy shop crap mushrooms again.

Anyhoo. Serve that lot up with a piping hot cup of Fortnum and Mason's Breakfast Tea (from a TEAPOT, people - or at least an infuser! And add the milk first).

To complete the "Full English", cut a couple of really thick, doorstep slices from a local organic granary loaf (preferably a still-warm one you picked up from the baker in the village on your way home from the mushroom farm, though I do find that bread that's just starting to go stale makes excellent toast).
Never use ready-sliced. Whoever came up with the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" was a twat.
Toast 'em under the grill, carefully turning the bread several times and ensuring that the outside is crisp and dark (but not burnt) and the inside good and hot (making successful "Fat toast" is an art form in itself) and then spread thinly with local unsalted butter and serve up with lashings of yummy bitter orange marmalade.

A second cup of tea to wash that lot down and there you have a proper Full English Breakfast.

Accept no substitute!

I treat myself to this around once a month. Usually, my breakfast consists of a latte and a croissant but as a special treat this is unbeatable.
The only drawback to enjoying a Dive-cooked Full English Breakfast is that you have to spend the night with me first.