Breakfast at Mons Hall

The English breakfast is, of course, something I never knew at home. An Italian mother does not engage with English breakfasts. But my English grandmother... That's different, and I have very happy memories. Breakfast was served after milking had finished, not before work started. We would eat it at about 9am, but uncle Phil was stubborn and awkward, and would always come in and eat his breakfast at about 11am when everybody had gone. It meant he ate his lunch late after everybody else too, but that was how he liked it.

Breakfast for me on the farm always started with a small bowl of porridge. The bowl was hemispherical and with a rim. The porridge had been poured in and had set, but was kept warm on top of the range. When served we would add a little more milk (from the cows we had just helped to milk, of course) and the milk would go round and under the hemisphere of porridge. Then we would insert our teaspoon into the golden syrup ("Out of the strong came forth sweetness"), twirling the spoon as we extracted the syrup so as to keep it on the spoon. This was placed over the bowl and then drawn up, high in the air over the porridge, so the trickle made fanciful patterns over the surface of the porridge. The spoon would be licked to clean it and then the porridge would be eaten, from the outer edge inwards, and in a carefully controlled pattern, so that the porridge became like a diminishing doily.

The main course was, of course, the fried breakfast. The bacon was very different to modern bacon. It came from the local butcher in the village, who killed the pigs himself and cured the bacon too. It was much drier than modern bacon, and when cooked was almost brittle, very salty and rich in flavour. I have never been able to reclaim that taste. The egg was from the farm too, of course, and fried in the bacon fat. The other accompaniment was a heated tinned plum tomato. And a piece of fried bread finished off the serving, fried in the bacon fat. 

Eating was another ritual, which I still follow. The fried bread (cut horizontally, never diagonally, which was a middle class pretension) was gradually cut into small squares, and each piece was garnished with a small piece of tomato, a fragment of bacon, a portion of egg white, and a little of the yolk. The bread usually came from Eastacott's in Okehampton, delivered by their van, as was the bacon from Neal's of Dolton, and the large white farmhouse loaf was sliced by my grandmother with her well-sharpened carving knife, never a bread knife, and was sliced by holding the loaf vertically against the belly and cut by drawing the knife towards you rather like harakiri.

The final course was a slice of toasted bread, buttered, and served with Golden Shred marmalade, complete with golliwog labels. The breakfast was accompanied with frequent cups of strong tea with plenty of sugar.