Books, Arts & Manners: A Conservative Breakfast

THE English have largely abandoned the traditional cooked breakfast. The wives are too lazy and churlish to cook it. Their husbands and children are too lazy to get up in time to eat it. In addition, all of them gullibly swallow the propaganda of assorted food faddists and health fascists. So they spoon up mixtures of grey cardboard, sawdust, and skimmed milk before they slouch off to the office, school, or unemployment-handout center. This mixture, they believe, will make them go to the lavatory, banish heart disease, and guarantee that they live forever. Why such a lazy people should want to do something as energetic as live forever is a mystery.

Many Americans have apparently kept the cooked breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, sausage, and fried (preboiled) potatoes. They are to be congratulated. But only a little, for what they have kept is only the appearance. Their breakfasts are a sham. They too are lazy, especially when it comes to shopping for the right ingredients. Take the first word in the above description, “fried.” Frying imparts taste because of the changes that occur when foods are cooked at the temperature it makes possible. But also, and crucially, the frying medium gives its own taste especially to eggs and potatoes. Breakfast must be cooked in meat fat. Bacon fat is the norm. Pork fat will do. Goose and duck fat are excellent. Chicken fat is very good too. I like pheasant fat. The conservative kitchen always has plenty of all of these because its cook prepares lots of bacon, geese, and chickens, and keeps the fat. If you do not and thus don’t have good fat and won’t obtain it any other way, then don’t even try to prepare a cooked breakfast. It will be a sham, a lie, a cheat. Eat cardboard instead—for an eternity.

DA

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Digby Anderson

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THE English have largely abandoned the traditional cooked breakfast. The wives are too lazy and churlish to cook it. Their husbands and children are too lazy to get up in time to eat it. In addition, all of them gullibly swallow the propaganda of assorted food faddists and health fascists. So they spoon up mixtures of grey cardboard, sawdust, and skimmed milk before they slouch off to the office, school, or unemployment-handout center. This mixture, they believe, will make them go to the lavatory, banish heart disease, and guarantee that they live forever. Why such a lazy people should want to do something as energetic as live forever is a mystery.

Many Americans have apparently kept the cooked breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, sausage, and fried (preboiled) potatoes. They are to be congratulated. But only a little, for what they have kept is only the appearance. Their breakfasts are a sham. They too are lazy, especially when it comes to shopping for the right ingredients. Take the first word in the above description, “fried.” Frying imparts taste because of the changes that occur when foods are cooked at the temperature it makes possible. But also, and crucially, the frying medium gives its own taste especially to eggs and potatoes. Breakfast must be cooked in meat fat. Bacon fat is the norm. Pork fat will do. Goose and duck fat are excellent. Chicken fat is very good too. I like pheasant fat. The conservative kitchen always has plenty of all of these because its cook prepares lots of bacon, geese, and chickens, and keeps the fat. If you do not and thus don’t have good fat and won’t obtain it any other way, then don’t even try to prepare a cooked breakfast. It will be a sham, a lie, a cheat. Eat cardboard instead—for an eternity.